This book presents the flags, folklore, culture, architecture, government, industry, and natural wonders unique to Texas.

Since it was first published in 1996, Official Guide to Texas State Parks and Historic Sites has become Texans' one-stop source for information on great places to view scenic landscapes, tour historical sites, camp, fish, hike, backpack, swim, ride horseback, go rock climbing, and enjoy almost any other outdoor recreation. This revised edition includes five new state parks and historical sites, completely updated information for every park, and many beautiful new photographs. The book is organized by geographical regions to help you plan your trips around the state. For every park, Laurence Parent provides all of the essential information: The natural or historical attractions of the park Types of recreation offered Camping and lodging facilities Addresses and phone numbers A locator map Magnificent color photographs So if you want to watch the sun set over Enchanted Rock, fish in the surf on the beach at Galveston, or listen for a ghostly bugle among the ruins of Fort Lancaster, let this book be your complete guide. Don't take a trip in Texas without it.

A calaboose is, quite simply, a tiny jail. Designed to house prisoners only for a short time, a calaboose could be anything from an iron cage to a poured concrete blockhouse. Easily constructed and more affordable for small communities than a full-sized building, calabooses once dotted the rural landscape. Though a relic of a bygone era in law enforcement and no longer in use, many calabooses remain in communities throughout Texas, often hidden in plain sight. In The Texas Calaboose and Other Forgotten Jails, William E. Moore has compiled the first guidebook to extant calabooses in Texas. He explores the history of the calaboose, including its construction, use, and eventual decline, but the heart of the book is in the alphabetically arranged photo tour of calabooses across the state. Each entry is accompanied by a vignette describing the unique features of the calaboose at hand, any infamous or otherwise memorable occupants, and the state of the calaboose at present. Most have been long abandoned, but because many remain on city or town property, some have been repurposed into storage buildings or even government offices. In certain ways, these small jails encapsulate the history of outlying communities during a time of transition from the “Wild West” to the twentieth century. Some of the structures have been preserved and cared-for, but despite the stories they can tell, many more are endangered or have already been lost. This definitive guide to tiny Texas jails serves as a record of a unique and disappearing feature of our heritage.

A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.

In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

Explaining Texas is over seventy stories every Texan should know about Texas. For non- Texans, it helps them understand why Texans are the way they are. The cattle drives up the Chisom trail to Abilene.Texas Rangers, "One Ranger, one riot." Famous Rangers, Hays, McNelly, Walker.Outlaws John Wesley Hardin shot 42 men who just needed killing. Dallas dentist, Doc. Holliday, Lady outlaw Belle Star, and others.Jefferson, Texas, on the shores of Caddo Lake, the most beautiful lake in the United States, where they averaged a murder a day. The Texas revolution, the Goliad massacre, battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. The Texas Navy that made independence possible. Galveston, the 1900 hurricane, worst natural disaster on American history.Cynthia Ann Parker, abducted by Comanche as a child, Gave birth to the last and greatest Comanche Chief. Texas weather, Wrong way Corrigan, the dust bowl, buried treasure, Del Rio Radio, and many more.