This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The People Projects Book includes using sidewalk chalk to draw a life-sized state People on Parade, making a diversity flag, writing a poem about a state poet, designing a scrapbook of famous state women and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.

Grades K-8. Features 30 projects for kids to complete-and includes actual state facts. Each project is quick, easy, and inexpensive! Projects include: writing a poem about a state poet; creating a small bulletin board about a state leader; holding a classroom court; creating a costume to imitate one of the first people on our land; and more! Students will have a blast creating projects. Most projects use ordinary, easy-to-access materials. 32 pages.

A city dweller’s vacant lot . . . A rancher's back forty . . . A hiker's favorite park . . . When the places that we love are threatened, we can be stirred to action. In Texas, people of all stripes and backgrounds have fought hard to safeguard the places they hold dear. To find and preserve these stories of courage and perseverance, the Conservation History Association of Texas launched the Texas Legacy Project in 1998, traveling thousands of miles to conduct hundreds of interviews with people from all over the state. These remarkable oral histories now reside in an incomparable online and physical archive of video, audio, text, and other materials that record these extraordinary efforts by veteran conservationists and ordinary citizens to preserve the natural legacy of Texas. This book holds stories from more than sixty people who represent a variety of causes, communities, and walks of life—from a West Texas grocer fighting nuclear waste to an Austin lobbyist pressing for green energy. Each speaks from the heart in personal reminiscences and first-hand accounts of battles fought for land and wildlife, for public health, and for a voice in media and politics. These impassioned accounts remind us of the importance of protecting and conserving the natural resources in our own backyards . . . wherever they may be. Records of the archive are available at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Five dollars of the cost of this book goes to environmentally friendly materials and processes.

The Texas Landscape Project explores conservation and ecology in Texas by presenting a highly visual and deeply researched view of the widespread changes that have affected the state as its population and economy have boomed and as Texans have worked ever harder to safeguard its bountiful but limited natural resources. Covering the entire state, from Pineywoods bottomlands and Panhandle playas to Hill Country springs and Big Bend canyons, the project examines a host of familiar and not so familiar environmental issues. A companion volume to The Texas Legacy Project, this book tracks specific environmental changes that have occurred in Texas using more than 300 color maps, expertly crafted by cartographer Jonathan Ogren, and over 100 photographs that coalesce to fashion a broad portrait of the modern Texas landscape. The rich data, compiled by author David Todd, are presented in clearly written yet marvelously detailed text that gives historical context and contemporary statistics for environmental trends connected to the land, water, air, energy, and built world of the second-largest and second-most populated state in the nation. An engaging read for any environmentalist or conscientious citizen, The Texas Landscape Project provides a true sense of the grand scope of the Lone Star State and the high stakes of protecting it. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Vol. 3: A supplement, edited by Eldon Stephen Branda. Includes bibliographical references.

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century.