In 1936, the Texas centennial was celebrated across the state. In The Frontier Centennial, Jacob Olmstead argues that Fort Worth?s celebration of the centennial represented a unique opportunity to reshape the city?s identity and align itself with a progressive future. Olmstead draws out the Frontier Centennial from its inception as a commemorative fair to theme park enshrining the mythic West to show the various ways centennial planners, boosters, and civic leaders sought to use the celebration as a means to bolster the city?s identity and image as a modern city of the American West. Olmstead?s retelling of the Frontier Centennial looks at two distinctive processes. The first addresses the interplay of memory, identity, and image in the evolution of the celebration?s commemorative messages. Fort Worth?s image as a progressive western metropolis also impacted other areas, less central, to Frontier Centennial planning. Debates over how outsiders would interpret features of the celebration, carried on by club women and others, reveal the interest the citizenry held in upholding or contesting the city?s modern image. Overlapping with the issues of memory and identity, the second process addresses how the larger narratives of the mythic West influenced the content of the celebration. Though drawn from actual events and people, the myth reduces the past to its ?ideological essence.? Mythmakers, like historians, draw upon facts to explain and give meaning to a particular worldview.

Fair Park Deco is a fascinating tour of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. Like every American exposition in the 1930s, it began in economic depression. Although its economy had been buoyed by major oil discoveries in the early '30s, Texas agriculture was hard hit by the Great Depression. By the middle of the decade, state officials had set their sights on a great centennial celebration to help stimulate the economy and attract tourist dollars. "If during the next six months the people of the state could become filled with the idea of holding a big celebration on the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Texas independence," the state's centennial commission speculated in July, 1934, "it would have the effect of creating a general forward-looking spirit through the state. It would be more stimulating than anything we can think of, and this effect would be immediate." This book focuses specifically on the Art Deco art and architecture of Fair Park--the public spaces, buildings, sculptures and murals that were designed for the 1936 exposition. Most of the chapters in the book represent different areas of Fair Park, with buildings and artwork effectively arranged in the same order that a visitor to the Texas Centennial Exposition might have seen them. The art and architecture are featured in original photography by Jim Parsons and David Bush as well as in historic photographs. Fair Park is one of the finest collections of Deco architecture in the country, but it is so much more: the embodiment of Texan swagger, it is a testament to the Texanic task of creating a dazzling spectacle in the darkest days of the Depression.

The Texas Centennial of 1936, commemorated by statewide celebrations of independence from Mexico, proved to be a powerful catalyst for the formation of a distinctly Mexican American identity. Confronted by a media frenzy that vilified "Meskins" as the antithesis of Texan liberty, Mexican Americans created literary responses that critiqued these racialized representations while forging a new bilingual, bicultural community within the United States. The development of a modern Tejana identity, controversies surrounding bicultural nationalism, and other conflictual aspects of the transformation from mexicano to Mexican American are explored in this study. Capturing this fascinating aesthetic and political rebirth, Border Renaissance presents innovative readings of important novels by María Elena Zamora O'Shea, Américo Paredes, and Jovita González. In addition, the previously overlooked literary texts by members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) are given their first detailed consideration in this compelling work of intellectual and literary history. Drawing on extensive archival research in the English and Spanish languages, John Morán González revisits the 1930s as a crucial decade for the vibrant Mexican American reclamation of Texas history. Border Renaissance pays tribute to this vital turning point in the Mexican American struggle for civil rights.

Few buildings in Fort Worth are more iconic than the Will Rogers Coliseum and Auditorium. Built in 1936 as a part of the Texas Centennial celebrations, it stands as a tribute to the spirit of patriotism and pride with which it was constructed and to the optimism that it represented. The list of events that have been held at this venue includes World War II bond drives, Golden Gloves boxing competitions, the symphony, the opera, rock concerts, high school graduations, the Ice Capades, evangelical gatherings, and, of course, the Fort Worth Stock Show. As each decade passes, new demands challenge the role the complex may serve in the future. It is hoped that this book will contribute in some small way to the preservation of this amazing structure.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[The] rare biography of a public figure that's not only beautifully written, but also shockingly revelatory." -- The Atlantic A vivid biography of former First Lady Barbara Bush, one of the most influential and under-appreciated women in American political history. Barbara Pierce Bush was one of the country's most popular and powerful figures, yet her full story has never been told. THE MATRIARCH tells the riveting tale of a woman who helped define two American presidencies and an entire political era. Written by USA TODAY's Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, this biography is informed by more than one hundred interviews with Bush friends and family members, hours of conversation with Mrs. Bush herself in the final six months of her life, and access to her diaries that spanned decades. THE MATRIARCH examines not only her public persona but also less well-known aspects of her remarkable life. As a girl in Rye, New York, Barbara Bush weathered criticism of her weight from her mother, barbs that left lifelong scars. As a young wife, she coped with the death of her three-year-old daughter from leukemia, a loss that changed her forever. In middle age, she grappled with depression so serious that she contemplated suicide. And as first the wife and then the mother of American presidents, she made history as the only woman to see -- and advise -- both her husband and son in the Oval Office. As with many women of her era, Barbara Bush was routinely underestimated, her contributions often neither recognized nor acknowledged. But she became an astute and trusted political campaign strategist and a beloved First Lady. She invested herself deeply in expanding literacy programs in America, played a critical role in the end of the Cold War, and led the way in demonstrating love and compassion to those with HIV/AIDS. With her cooperation, this book offers Barbara Bush's last words for history -- on the evolution of her party, on the role of women, on Donald Trump, and on her family's legacy. Barbara Bush's accomplishments, struggles, and contributions are many. Now, Susan Page explores them all in THE MATRIARCH, a groundbreaking book certain to cement Barbara Bush as one of the most unique and influential women in American history.

Considers (74) H.J. Res. 293.