At 100 years old, Texas City is a relatively young city. It was founded not for its beauty or its climate but for its strategic location on the Gulf of Mexico. It developed into a major port city, and industries sprang up and flourished. From bare acreage, the founders forged a community that would become a hometown to thousands of people. Texas City has seen its highs and lows. The U.S. Air Force experienced its humble beginnings here, for instance. The same port, however, that gave life to the desolate land brought destruction in 1947 in the form of the Texas City explosion. A ship carrying ammonium nitrate blew up, killing almost 600 residents, injuring thousands, and bringing damage to nearly every building in town. Texas City recovered from the explosion and in the following decades, continued to be a place of pride for its citizens. The pages of this book are filled with images dating from the 1950s and 1960s to bring back the feeling of a bygone era in Texas City.

The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city's identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region's environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a "city in a garden" perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century. In telling Austin's story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin's mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city's midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin's green growth.

On April 16, 1947, a small fire broke out among bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the hold of the ship Grandcamp as it lay docked at Texas City, Texas. Despite immediate attempts to extinguish the fire, it rapidly intensified until the Grandcamp exploded in a blast that caused massive loss of life and property. In the ensuing chaos, no one gave much thought to the ship in the next slip, the High Flyer. It exploded sixteen hours later. The story of the Texas City explosions—America’s worst industrial disaster in terms of casualties—has never been fully told until now. In this book, Hugh W. Stephens draws on official reports, newspaper and magazine articles, personal letters, and interviews with several dozen survivors to provide the first full account of the disaster at Texas City. Stephens describes the two explosions and the heroic efforts of Southeast Texans to rescue survivors and cope with extensive property damage. At the same time, he explores why the disaster occurred, showing how a chain of indifference and negligence made a serious industrial accident almost inevitable, while a lack of emergency planning allowed it to escalate into a major catastrophe. This gripping, cautionary tale holds important lessons for a wide reading public.

The Grandcamp freighter held a deadly recipe in the port city of Texas City in 1947. As workers loaded bags of fertilizer made with ammonium nitrate into the ship's hold, particles from broken bags mixed with flammable debris in the freighter's hot underbelly. Heat caused the ammonium nitrate to combust, leading to one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history. In narrative detail, The Texas City Disaster recounts how the Grandcamp's explosion sent fireballs skyward to land on homes and stores, engulfing the city in flames. Through this drama, kids will learn how new safety procedures for chemical shipments help prevent such disasters today. A series of primary-source quotes from witnesses reveal the human drama, while a "Profiles" section lists players in Texas City.

On April 16, 1947, a small fire broke out among bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the hold of the ship Grandcamp as it lay docked at Texas City, Texas. Despite immediate attempts to extinguish the fire, it rapidly intensified until the Grandcamp exploded in a blast that caused massive loss of life and property. In the ensuing chaos, no one gave much thought to the ship in the next slip, the High Flyer. It exploded sixteen hours later. The story of the Texas City explosions—America’s worst industrial disaster in terms of casualties—has never been fully told until now. In this book, Hugh W. Stephens draws on official reports, newspaper and magazine articles, personal letters, and interviews with several dozen survivors to provide the first full account of the disaster at Texas City. Stephens describes the two explosions and the heroic efforts of Southeast Texans to rescue survivors and cope with extensive property damage. At the same time, he explores why the disaster occurred, showing how a chain of indifference and negligence made a serious industrial accident almost inevitable, while a lack of emergency planning allowed it to escalate into a major catastrophe. This gripping, cautionary tale holds important lessons for a wide reading public.

"This book is the first history of cities in Texas, covering the earliest days of Spanish-Mexican towns, the Republic era to about 1940, and metropolitan Texas to the present. Not only is this book a first for Texas, but there seem to be no equivalent books for any other states, so the author has developed new concepts like 'the first road frontier' and the 'rupture' caused by the railroads. McComb emphasizes how railroads and related innovations such as the telegraph and the clock facilitated in urban development"--Provided by publisher.