March 4, 1911). . . and even at night when I cross the turbulent waters of the Rio Grande and listen to the music her waters make in their mad rush to the sea, it seems to say, I pass on and on, but not you. Lonely musings and vivid accounts of daily life along the Mexican border provide an intriguing glimpse into frontier life in Texas during the troubled times of the Mexican Revolution. Jim Landrum was a successful lawyer when he left Florida in 1908 to recover from tuberculosis in the West. After a regimen of mercury treatments, he settled in the Big Bend and gradually regained his strength. He found a place in the border community as a trading post manager, justice of the peace, postmaster, and medic and married the daughter of a respected Mexican family. Frequent letters to family in Pensacola shared his joys and problems. The most devastating of these to be falsely accused of a crimewith no hope for a fair trial, he joined Carranzas Constitutionistas as a captain surgeon. In 1914, he rode with soldiers into Mexico and disappeared. The baby he and his wife expected would one day be called The Cinderella of Big Bend.

Diane Garner considers herself a small town Texas Anglo girl with an astonishingly successful single mom. She experiences a dramatic transition from desperate poverty that resulted when her father abandoned the family. The family finds prosperity in a small Texas town when her mother becomes a hospital executive a very unusual career for a woman in the fifties. Diane grows up in the nurturing community where she enjoys various adventures and mischievous pranks with friends. One day at the age of twenty-two she learns a startling secret about her mother's hidden past, then embarks on a journey to restore the lost legacy of her family.

The Texas-Mexico border is trouble. Haphazardly splashing across the meandering Rio Grande into Mexico is--or at least can be--risky business, hazardous to one's health and well-being. Kirby W. Dendy, the Chief of Texas Rangers, corroborates the sobering reality: "As their predecessors for over one hundred forty years before them did, today's Texas Rangers continue to battle violence and transnational criminals along the Texas-Mexico border." In Riding Lucifer's Line, Bob Alexander, in his characteristic storytelling style, surveys the personal tragedies of twenty-five Texas Rangers who made the ultimate sacrifice as they scouted and enforced laws throughout borderland counties adjacent to the Rio Grande. The timeframe commences in 1874 with formation of the Frontier Battalion, which is when the Texas Rangers were actually institutionalized as a law enforcing entity, and concludes with the last known Texas Ranger death along the border in 1921. Alexander also discusses the transition of the Rangers in two introductory sections: "The Frontier Battalion Era, 1874-1901" and "The Ranger Force Era, 1901-1935," wherein he follows Texas Rangers moving from an epochal narrative of the Old West to more modern, technological times. Written absent a preprogrammed agenda, Riding Lucifer's Line is legitimate history. Adhering to facts, the author is not hesitant to challenge and shatter stale Texas Ranger mythology. Likewise, Alexander confronts head-on many of those critical Texas Ranger histories relying on innuendo and gossip and anecdotal accounts, at the expense of sustainable evidence--writings often plagued with a deficiency of rational thinking and common sense. Riding Lucifer's Line is illustrated with sixty remarkable old-time photographs. Relying heavily on archived Texas Ranger documents, the lively text is authenticated with more than one thousand comprehensive endnotes.

The award-winning barbecue cook and author of Brunswick Stew shares the flavorful history of the Old Dominion’s unique culinary heritage. With more than four hundred years of history, Virginians lay claim to the invention of southern barbecue. Native Virginian Powhatan tribes slow roasted meat on wooden hurdles or grills. James Madison hosted grand barbecue parties during the colonial and federal eras. The unique combination of vinegar, salt, pepper, oils and various spices forms the mouthwatering barbecue sauce that was first used by colonists in Virginia and then spread throughout the country. Today, authentic Virginia barbecue is regionally diverse and remains culturally vital. Drawing on hundreds of historical and contemporary sources, author, competition barbecue judge and award-winning barbecue cook Joe Haynes documents the delectable history of barbecue in the Old Dominion.

To see Weeping Mary you've got to head to Texas. The grand state even boasts a Little Hope. Texas Towns is a smart volume full of peculiar places. Author Don Blevins is generous in his detailing of the counties, routes, and landmarks that distinguish the hundreds of villages with quirky names scattered throughout the Lone Star State. History is told-the dates these curious settlements began, early inhabitants, previous names of the villages, and how each town's name came to be. Travel through the alphabet of Texas. Learn the history of teh unique town in which you live. Or get educated about a place like Blowout Community, just another little pieced of Texas.

From a rediscovered collection of autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of Kansas pioneer women in the early twentieth century, Joanna Stratton has created a collection hailed by Newsweek as “uncommonly interesting” and “a remarkable distillation of primary sources.” Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience. These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men—and at last that partnership has been recognized. “These voices are haunting” (The New York Times Book Review), and they reveal the special heroism and industriousness of pioneer women as never before.