T. Lindsay Baker - Böcker

The indefatigable T. Lindsay Baker has now turned his enormous mental and physical energies to the subject and has brought to view - if not to life -eighty-six Texas ghost towns for the reader's pleasure. Baker lists three criteria for inclusion: tangible remains, public access, and statewide coverage. In each case Baker comments about the town's founding, its former significance, and the reasons for its decline. There are maps and instructions for reaching each site and numerous photographs showing the past and present status of each. The contemporary photos were taken, in most instances, by Baker himself, who proves as adept a photographer as he is researcher and writer....Baker has done his work thoroughly and well, within limits imposed by necessity. He obviously had fun in the process and it shows in his prose.""---New Mexico Historical Review

These are fascinating stories of the memories of ex-slaves, fourteen of which have never been published before. Although many African Americans had relocated in Oklahoma after emancipation in1865, some of the interviewees had been slaves of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, or Creeks in the Indian territory.

There is something romantic yet harshly concrete about an abandoned town. Dreams, conflicts, and losses still haunt what remains, so it's no wonder we call these locales ""ghost towns."" A companion volume to his Ghost Towns of Texas, T. Lindsay Baker's More Ghost Towns of Texas provides readers with histories, maps, and detailed directions to the most interesting ghost towns in Texas not already covered in the first volume.The ninety-four towns described in this book range from American Indian sites abandoned prior to the arrival of Europeans to towns abandoned within the past decade. Baker's own recent photographs of the towns are complemented by historic photographs of more prosperous times. Many of these locations have never before appeared in any ghost town guide.Based on hundreds of miles of travel and fieldwork in abandoned towns all across Texas, More Ghost Towns of Texas lists sites throughout the state so that people from anywhere in the state can reach a ghost town in a day's trip.

By the time Route 66 received its official numerical designation in 1926, picture postcards had become popular travel souvenirs. At the time, these postcards with colorful images served as advertisements for roadside businesses.While cherished by collectors, these postcard depictions do not always reflect reality. They often present instead a view enhanced for promotional purposes. Portrait of Route 66 lets us see for the first time the actual photographs from which the postcards were made, and in describing how the production process worked, introduces us to an extraordinary archival collection, adding new history to this iconic road.The Curt Teich Postcard Archives, held at the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois, contains one of the nation's largest collections of Route 66 images, including thousands of job files for postcards produced by Curt Teich and Company of Chicago. T. Lindsay Baker combed these files to choose the best examples of postcards and their accompanying photographs not only to reflect well-known sites along the route but also to demonstrate the relationships between photographs and their resulting postcards.The photographs show the reality of the locations that customers sometimes wanted ""improved"" for aesthetic purposes in creating the postcards. Such alterations included removing utility poles or automobile traffic and rendering overcast skies partly cloudy.This book will interest historians of art and design as well as the worldwide audiences of Route 66 aficionados and postcard collectors. For its mining of an invaluable and little-known photographic archive and depiction of high-quality photographs that have not been seen before, Portrait of Route 66 will be irresistible to all who are interested in American history and culture.

From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck’s words, America’s Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were—adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, vacationing families or a new breed of tourists—these travelers had to eat. The story of where they stopped and what they found, and of how these roadside offerings changed over time, reveals twentieth-century America on the move, transforming the nation’s cuisine, culture, and landscape along the way.Author T. Lindsay Baker, a glutton for authenticity, drove the historic route—or at least the 85 percent that remains intact—in a four-cylinder 1930 Ford station wagon. Sparing us the dust and bumps, he takes us for a spin along Route 66, stopping to sample the fare at diners, supper clubs, and roadside stands and to describe how such venues came and went—even offering kitchen-tested recipes from historic eateries en route. Start-ups that became such American fast-food icons as McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Steak ’n Shake, and Taco Bell feature alongside mom-and-pop diners with flocks of chickens out back and sit-down restaurants with heirloom menus. Food-and-drink establishments from speakeasies to drive-ins share the right-of-way with other attractions, accommodations, and challenges, from the Whoopee Auto Coaster in Lyons, Illinois, to the piles of “chat” (mining waste) in the Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, to the perils of driving old automobiles over the Jericho Gap in the Texas Panhandle or Sitgreaves Pass in western Arizona. Describing options for the wealthy and the not-so-well-heeled, from hotel dining rooms to ice cream stands, Baker also notes the particular travails African Americans faced at every turn, traveling Route 66 across the decades of segregation, legal and illegal.So grab your hat and your wallet (you’ll probably need cash) and come along for an enlightening trip down America’s memory lane—a westward tour through the nation’s heartland and history, with all the trimmings, via Route 66.

The Birth of a Texas Ghost Town: Thurber 1886–1933 provides readers with a detailed history of the rise and fall of one of the most notable coal-mining and brick-producing communities in Texas. . . . Any historian interested in Texas history, urban studies, and business history would find this book a valuable resource.”—Southwestern Historical QuarterlyGentry’s work is full of anecdotes that give life to the community, and her story illuminates an important chapter in Texas history . . . Gentry’s work should rekindle interest in Texas coal mining.”—Journal of Southern History