Jessie and Ki follow the trail of some rough-riding freedom-fighters in the eighty-fourth Lone Star novel! They call them The Lone Star Legend: Jessica Starbuck—a magnificent woman of the West, fighting for justice on America's frontier, and Ki—the martial arts master sworn to protect her and the code she lived by. Together they conquered the West as no other man and woman ever had!

To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War emythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores the genuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in American history. • “A balanced, unromanticized account [of] America’s great epic.” —The New York Times Book Review From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholic Sam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisis and glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionist aspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story of Texas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history. Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking in the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad, its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, and its day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ lively history draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters to animate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits, and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.

This book will provide the new, as well as the inexperienced general contractor with the practical know-how to set up and profitably run a construction company. It will show how to organize, and what to be on the look out for financially, legally and commercially.

"[This book] concentrates upon a strongly bonded family during a period of separation that is necessarily preserved in much greater detail than their happier moments spent in one another's company. Being based to a large extent on letters that surely were never intended for the eyes of anyone outside the family and an intimate circle of friends, it also gives a more spontaneous view than most journals offer. These letters, preserved for more than eleven decades, are the record of years during which the Ernst Coreth family began really to enter into the affairs of its new homeland. No wish to magnify the importance of these people, no intent to dramatize their fate motivated the accompanying study, for much of what the Coreths experienced other immigrants experienced also"--Preface.

Only eighteen years old when he marched off to war, young Confederate Robert Campbell already possessed the keen, perceptive eye of a seasoned journalist. After fighting with the 5th Texas Infantry Regiment in the famed Hood's Texas Brigade, Campbell recorded the first months of his service for the benefit of future generations of his family. Now editors George Skoch and Mark W. Perkins bring Campbell's riveting eyewitness accounts from the frontline to the public in Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the 5th Texas Infantry, a lively and telling glimpse into a Johnny Reb's life. This young Confederate's tale of battle begins with his introduction to the unit in Virginia and continues through to his furlough home after he suffers a serious battle wound at Second Manassas. Among the thousands who served in what arguably was the most renowned combat unit in the Southern army, Hood's Texas Brigade, Campbell holds the dubious distinction of being the most wounded man, sustaining six wounds during the course of the war. Campbell praises Southern women who cared for soldiers along the railroad line from Richmond to Montgomery and recalls eating ten ears of green corn after three days of short rations and a hard day of fighting. He recounts falling asleep on picket duty despite the fear of punishment by death, and describes being under cannon fire and suffering a painful leg injury. The terrible conditions of battle—eating and sleeping too little, marching and drilling too much, cleaning weapons and standing watch in the rain and cold—are vividly real under Campbell's pen, which also praises his leaders, Lee, Jackson, and other Confederate officers. Skoch and Perkins have supplemented the record of Campbell's wartime service with his letters written during and after the war. His remarkable firsthand account of life in the 5th Texas will find a permanent niche in the literature of the Civil War.

Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as “terrorist” on the one hand, and “model minority” on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection.