Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students – serie

The history of Texas is mapped out in this atlas of Texas' geographical and political evolution. Texas Boundaries provides a concise reference to the boundary changes that have been part of the state's experience since the earliest days. From the early boundaries of New Spain to the 254 governmental bodies we know as counties today, the drawing of these geo-political units reflects both the history of the state and the passions and philosophy that underlie it. As population increased, more county courthouses were needed, and new counties were created. Every time a new county was formed, Texas had a new map. This book documents the development of these Texas maps. Behind the maps are the stories of the founders of the new counties, the actions of the governmental body that created the county, the choice of a name for the county, and colorful stories about the selection of county seats. Specialists, general readers, and anyone interested in the geography of the Lone Star State will find this book, indeed, a ""gem.

One- and two-room schools represent a paradoxical time in Texas history when school played second fiddle to family duties but still served as the focus of community life. Luther Bryan Clegg's The Empty Schoolhouse provides a direct link to the past through interviews with students who attended these schools and teachers who taught in this area between Fort Worth and Odessa and the Hill Country and Amarillo. Former students share stories describing Friday afternoon ""literary societies,"" dead snakes in desk drawers, pranks, fires, travel to and from school, and discipline. Drawing on historical and sociological data as well as interviews. Clegg presents intriguing accounts of rural life, preserving the uniqueness of the ""olden days.

The music of Texas and the American Southwest is as diverse and distinctive as the many different groups who have lived in the region over the past several centuries, writes Gary Hartman in his introduction to this refreshingly different look at various genres of Texas music. ""The Roots of Texas Music"" celebrates the diverse sources of the music of the Lone Star State by gathering chapters by specialists on each of them. Editor, Lawrence S. Clayton, conceived this project as one that would not simply repeat the common wisdom about Texas music traditions but rather offer new perspectives. The result is a lively, captivating, and original look at the musical traditions of one of the nation's most fertile musical seedbeds. Authorities on each subject explore music of the Texas Germans and Czechs, black Creoles, Chicanos, and blues and gospel singers. The diverse genres included in this anthology also provide an introduction to the classes, cultures, races, and ethnic groups of Texas and highlight the ways in which the state's musical wealth has influenced the listening habits of the nation.

In 1916, seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington, a retarded black boy, was publicly tortured, lynched, and burned on the town square of Waco, Texas. Drawing on extensive research in the national files of the NAACP, local newspapers and archives, and interviews with the descendants of participants in the events of that day, Patricia Bernstein has reconstructed the details of not only the crime but also how it influenced the NAACP's antilynching campaign.

At the age of twenty-five, Bess Whitehead Scott became the first woman reporter for the city desk of the ""Houston Post"". The year was 1915.Born near Blanket, Texas, in 1890, Scott grew up on a small farm held together by her widowed mother and eight brothers and sisters. She graduated from Baylor University and taught school briefly before she persuaded the ""Post"" editors to give her a chance. Then, even before the filming of the silent movie classic, ""Birth of a Nation"", she went to the little film colony called Hollywood, to try her hand at writing ""scenarios.""Bess Scott encountered many individuals who made a deep impression on her. Clark Gable and Lyndon Johnson were her friends; her best friend, Lila Danforth, was always there during rough times. The talents and stamina of Bess Scott and her mother in fighting rural and urban hardships exemplify a century of women's progress and highlight the roles played by the ""interesting"" people strung along the thread of their lives.

Born in the 1880s in Jefferson, Texas, Lillian B. Jones Horace grew up in Fort Worth and dreamed of being a college-educated teacher, a goal she achieved. But life was hard for her and other blacks living and working in the Jim Crow South. Her struggles convinced her that education, particularly that involving the printed word, was the key to black liberation.In 1916, before Marcus Garvey gained fame for advocating black economic empowerment and a repatriation movement, Horace wrote a back-to-Africa novel, Five Generations Hence, the earliest published novel on record by a black woman from Texas and the earliest known utopian novel by any African American woman. She also wrote a biography of Lacey Kirk Williams, a renowned president of the National Baptist Convention; another novel, Angie Brown, that was never published; and a host of plays that her students at I. M. Terrell High School performed.Five Generations Hence languished after its initial publication. Along with Horace’s diary, the unpublished novel, and the Williams biography, the book was consigned to a collection owned by the Tarrant County Black Genealogical and Historical Society and housed at the Fort Worth Public Library. There, scholar and author Karen Kossie-Chernyshev rediscovered Horace’s work in the course of her efforts to track down and document a literary tradition that has been largely ignored by both the scholarly community and general readers. In this book, the full text of Horace’s Five Generations Hence, annotated and contextualised by Kossie-Chernyshev, is once again presented for examination by scholars and interested readers. In 2009 Kossie-Chernyshev invited nine scholars to a conference at Texas Southern University to give Horace’s works a comprehensive interdisciplinary examination. Subsequent work on those papers resulted in the studies that form the second half of this book.

Born in the 1880s in Jefferson, Texas, Lillian B. Jones Horace grew up in Fort Worth and dreamed of being a college-educated teacher, a goal she achieved. But life was hard for her and other blacks living and working in the Jim Crow South. Her struggles convinced her that education, particularly that involving the printed word, was the key to black liberation.In 1916, before Marcus Garvey gained fame for advocating black economic empowerment and a repatriation movement, Horace wrote a back-to-Africa novel, Five Generations Hence, the earliest published novel on record by a black woman from Texas and the earliest known utopian novel by any African American woman. She also wrote a biography of Lacey Kirk Williams, a renowned president of the National Baptist Convention; another novel, Angie Brown, that was never published; and a host of plays that her students at I. M. Terrell High School performed.Five Generations Hence languished after its initial publication. Along with Horace’s diary, the unpublished novel, and the Williams biography, the book was consigned to a collection owned by the Tarrant County Black Genealogical and Historical Society and housed at the Fort Worth Public Library. There, scholar and author Karen Kossie-Chernyshev rediscovered Horace’s work in the course of her efforts to track down and document a literary tradition that has been largely ignored by both the scholarly community and general readers. In this book, the full text of Horace’s Five Generations Hence, annotated and contextualised by Kossie-Chernyshev, is once again presented for examination by scholars and interested readers. In 2009 Kossie-Chernyshev invited nine scholars to a conference at Texas Southern University to give Horace’s works a comprehensive interdisciplinary examination. Subsequent work on those papers resulted in the studies that form the second half of this book.

Most Texans today know of Lawrence Sullivan Ross only by his namesake, Sul Ross State University, or for his role in the capture of Cynthia Ann Parker as a fabled Texas Ranger. A few may know that he was a general in the Confederate army or that he served as the nineteenth governor of Texas. But for former and current students of Texas A&M University, he is known as 'Sully' - an affectionate nickname referring to the oldest campus statue, which is the repository of wished-upon pennies left for good luck prior to taking final exams.In Sul Ross at Texas A&M, John A. Adams Jr., chronicler of Texas A&M University history, presents an in-depth examination of Ross's life as a college president. Adams shows how by the late 1880s, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas was on the brink of collapse. Student discontent, administrative mismanagement, and faculty factionalism threatened the continued existence of the fledgling school. The college's board of directors were desperate and offered the presidency to Ross.Adams details the steps Ross took to bring order out of chaos, expanding and modernizing the college and leading the school's finances out of the red. Many Aggie traditions first took shape during Ross's tenure: the class ring, the band, and even the school's first intercollegiate football game against the University of Texas. Ross's years at the helm were transformative. Fans of A&M and Texas history will be enthralled by this captivating account of Sul Ross's time as president of A&M.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War—more than fifty years later, its memory is already fading, although its cultural impact remains. Beginning in the mid-1950s with the Republic of South Vietnam in a civil war with North Vietnam over communism, the United States's military commitment rose to half a million soldiers, airmen, and sailors. Among them was Jerome Loving, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate. Over the next two decades, the conflict took the lives of nearly three million Vietnamese and sixty thousand Americans. Loving returned home from Vietnam in the final days of 1966 to watch the war as he pursued graduate degrees and pondered the cataclysm he had witnessed.As part of the first major wave of American troops, Loving describes in After the Good War: A Vietnam Memoir his life of nearly nine months in the combat zone between the treacherous streets of Saigon and the harbor and air base at Cam Ranh Bay. Loving's memoir, primarily based on letters he wrote while "in-country" to his wife and a diary kept during his service in Vietnam, is not a war story per se but a lament. Its looming symbol is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, DC; unlike previous war memorials or statues, it's a wall of words with the names of the deceased American combatants.After the Good War offers a deeply personal, nuanced meditation on the war and its aftereffects, both on American society and in the minds and hearts of the Americans who fought there.