For more than seventy-five years, the airwaves of Texas have buzzed with broadcast signals, beginning with a play-by-play Morse code transmission of the football game played by the University of Texas and Texas AandM on Thanksgiving Day, 1921.

An illustrated history of Abilene, Texas paired with histories of the local companies

Austin College has a heritage that is unsurpassed in the history of Texas higher education. Named in memory of Stephen F. Austin, it received a charter from the State of Texas in 1849, making the school the oldest college or university in the state operating under its original name and charter. Sam Houston, Anson Jones, and Henderson Yoakum served on its original board of trustees. The college first held classes in Huntsville during the fall of 1850 and moved to Sherman in 1876. Today the school is a nationally ranked private liberal arts college committed to leadership, learning, and lasting values that brings a global perspective to its student body and programs.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is important to consider the historical struggles that led to this groundbreaking decision. Four years earlier in Texas, the Sweatt v. Painter decision allowed blacks access to the University of Texas's law school for the first time. Amilcar Shabazz shows that the development of black higher education in Texas--which has historically had one of the largest state college and university systems in the South--played a pivotal role in the challenge to Jim Crow education. Shabazz begins with the creation of the Texas University Movement in the 1880s to lobby for equal access to the full range of graduate and professional education through a first-class university for African Americans. He traces the philosophical, legal, and grassroots components of the later campaign to open all Texas colleges and universities to black students, showing the complex range of strategies and the diversity of ideology and methodology on the part of black activists and intellectuals working to promote educational equality. Shabazz credits the efforts of blacks who fought for change by demanding better resources for segregated black colleges in the years before Brown, showing how crucial groundwork for nationwide desegregation was laid in the state of Texas.

In this compellingly argued and deeply personal book, respected sports historian Michael Oriard--who was himself a former second-team All-American at Notre Dame--explores a wide range of trends that have changed the face of big-time college football and transformed the role of the student-athlete. Oriard considers such issues as the politicizati...