Throughout America and around the world, the United States has been known as a beacon of hope and opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, from the crumbling urban ghetto of Detroit to the cash-strapped shores of California to the rust belt of the Midwest, America is not living up to that promise. Except in Texas. While unemployment soars elsewhere, Texans are hard at work. While small businesses across the country are going under, Texas entrepreneurs are thriving. While large companies are being squeezed by taxes, regulations and unions, more and more corporations are moving to Texas to grow and expand. While people of faith are ridiculed and marginalized in most cities on both coasts, in Texas churches and synagogues are bursting at the seams. How did Texas embrace what the rest of America seems to have forgotten? In Lonestar America, popular talk radio show host Mark Davis presents a powerful case for economic prosperity, individual freedom, strong families, and even stronger pride of place – alive and kicking in Texas, and easily exportable to the rest of America. Davis shows how Texas has done it, how some “honorary Texans” in other states (governors and even local communities) have adopted some of the same policies and approaches, and how states across the country can reclaim the promise of the American dream.

Texas has created more constitutional law than any other state. In any classroom nationwide, any basic constitutional law course can be taught using nothing but Texas cases. That, however, understates the history and politics behind the cases. Beyond representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases deal with the major issues of the nation. Leading legal scholar and Supreme Court historian Lucas A. Powe, Jr., charts the rich and pervasive development of Texas-inspired constitutional law. From voting rights to railroad regulations, school finance to capital punishment, poverty to civil liberties, this wide-ranging and eminently readable book provides a window into the relationship between constitutional litigation and ordinary politics at the Supreme Court, illuminating how all of the fiercest national divides over what the Constitution means took shape in Texas.

Throughout America and around the world, the United States has been known as a beacon of hope and opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, from the crumbling urban ghetto of Detroit to the cash-strapped shores of California to the rust belt of the Midwest, America is not living up to that promise. Except in Texas. While unemployment soars elsewhere, Texans are hard at work. While small businesses across the country are going under, Texas entrepreneurs are thriving. While large companies are being squeezed by taxes, regulations and unions, more and more corporations are moving to Texas to grow and expand. While people of faith are ridiculed and marginalized in most cities on both coasts, in Texas churches and synagogues are bursting at the seams. How did Texas embrace what the rest of America seems to have forgotten? In Lonestar America, popular talk radio show host Mark Davis presents a powerful case for economic prosperity, individual freedom, strong families, and even stronger pride of place – alive and kicking in Texas, and easily exportable to the rest of America. Davis shows how Texas has done it, how some “honorary Texans” in other states (governors and even local communities) have adopted some of the same policies and approaches, and how states across the country can reclaim the promise of the American dream.

To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War emythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores the genuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in American history. • “A balanced, unromanticized account [of] America’s great epic.” —The New York Times Book Review From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholic Sam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisis and glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionist aspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story of Texas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history. Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking in the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad, its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, and its day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ lively history draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters to animate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits, and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.