Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities – serie

As Texas entered the twentieth century, it was opening a new chapter in its cultural and social life, one that would see active efforts to promote not only appreciation of regional literature but also its creation. Author Betty Holland Wiesepape examines the contributions of literary societies and writers' clubs to the cultural and literary development that took place in Texas between the close of the frontier and the beginning of World War II. She offers an overview of literary club activity as well as case studies of four individual writers' clubs that functioned during the 1920s and 1930s. The first study of its kind, Lone Star Chapters contradicts the common perception that early Texas was a cultural wasteland and illuminates how educated citizens met together in locally organized clubs to read, write, and criticize members' original compositions. The stories of the Manuscript Club of Wichita Falls, the Border Poets of Kingsville, the Panhandle Penwomen of Amarillo, and the Makers of Dallas are based on archival research, interviews, and an examination of the literature produced by prominent club members. Each of the stories is set within its own historical and geographical context, and together they illuminate the important role of such clubs in the development of regional arts.

The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier - the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other's texts - continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make, but also show the range of cultural voices that are present in Southwestern literature: Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ana Castillo. Her central purposes are to consider how the differing versions of the Western ""mythic"" tales are being recast in a globalized world and to examine the ways in which they challenge and accommodate increasingly fluid and even dangerous racial, cultural, and international borders. In Spurgeon's analysis, the spaces in which the works of these three writers collide offer some sharply differentiated visions but also create new and unsupected forms, providing the most startling insights. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, the new myths are the expressions of the large culture from which they spring, both a projection onto a troubled and troubling past and an insistent, prophetic vision of a shared future.

Presenting the unique vision of an American original . . . Alexandre Hogue, a renowned artist whose career spanned from the 1920s to his death in 1994, inherited the view of an America that imagined itself as filled with limitless potential for improvement, that considered high art and great ideas accessible to ordinary working people, and that saw no reason for an intellectual chasm between a learned elite and the masses. He always viewed himself as a radical, yet his passion stemmed from a deeply conservative idea: that art, culture, and nature should form a central force in the life of every human being. His well-known Dust Bowl series labeled him as a regionalist painter, but Hogue never accepted that identity. His work reveals the spirit of Texas and the Southwest as he experienced it for nearly a century. In his later years Hogue worked in forms of crisply rendered nonobjective and calligraphic one-liner paintings. Bringing to light new information regarding the Erosion and Oil Industry series, this book gives special attention to lesser known, post-1945 works, in addition to the awe-inspiring Moon Shot and final Big Bend series. Each series—from the hauntingly beautiful Taos landscapes and prophetic canvases of a dust-covered Southwest to his depictions of the fierce geological phenomena of the Big Bend—serves as a paean to the awesomeness of nature. Houston-based curator and critic Susie Kalil grew close to Hogue from 1986 to 1994, a time during which she interviewed him, considered his oeuvre with him, and came to share his vision of the nature and purposes of art. In Alexandre Hogue she reveals Hogue as he presented himself and his work to her. Collections with Alexandre Hogue's paintings: Musee National D'Art Moderne, Pompidou, Paris DallasMuseum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The GilcreaseMuseum, Tulsa The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa University of Tulsa Tulsa Performing ArtsCenter Smithsonian Institution (NationalMuseum of American Art), Washington, DC OklahomaMuseum of Art, Okla City The SheldonMuseum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln PhoenixArt Museum University of Arizona, Tucson Art Museum of SouthTexas, Corpus Christi Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Tx. StarkMuseum, Orange, Tx Southern MethodistUniversity, Dallas SpringfieldArt Museum, Springfield, Missouri WeatherspoonArt Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro The Federal Reserve Bank, Dallas The Williams Companies, Tulsa

If the Southwest is known for its distinctive regional culture, it is not only the indigenous influences that make it so. As Anglo Americans moved into the territories of the greater Southwest, they brought with them a desire to reestablish the highest culture of their former homes: opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But their inherited culture was altered, challenged, and reshaped by Native American and Hispanic peoples, and a new, vibrant cultural life resulted. From Houston to Los Angeles, from Tulsa to Tucson, Keith L. Bryant traces the development of ""high culture"" in the Southwest.Humans create culture, but in the Southwest, Bryant argues, the land itself has also influenced that creation. ""Incredible light, natural grandeur, . . . and a geography at once beautiful and yet brutal molded societies that sprang from unique cultural sources."" The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness—an experience of place—that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture.Bryant also examines a paradox of Southwestern cultural life. Southwesterners take pride in their cultural distinctiveness, yet they struggled to win recognition for their achievements in ""high culture."" A dynamic tension between those seeking to re-create a Western European culture and those desiring one based on regional themes and resources continues to stimulate creativity.Decade by decade and city by city, Bryant charts the growth of cultural institutions and patronage as he describes the contributions of artists and performers and of the elites who support them. Bryant focuses on the significant role women played as leaders in the formation of cultural institutions and as writers, artists, and musicians. The text is enhanced by more than fifty photographs depicting the interplay between the people and the land and the culture that has resulted.

Elise Waerenskjold is known to fans of Texas women writers as ""the lady with the pen,"" from the title of a book of her writings. A forward-looking journalist, she sent letters and articles back to Norway that encouraged others to follow her footsteps to Texas, where a small colony of Norwegian settlers were making a new life alongside—but distinct from—other European immigrants.Undaunted is the first full biography of Waerenskjold during her Texas years, a life story that shows much about Texas, especially in the Norwegian colonies, from 1847 until near the end of the century. Moreover, it tells the story of a strong and independent thinker who championed women's rights, was pro-Union and against slavery (though her husband was in the Confederate army and was subsequently murdered in Reconstruction-era violence), and left an intriguing body of writing about life on the edges of Texas settlement.Charles Russell's vivid account of Waerenskjold describes not only her influence among her countrymen but also her own life, which was a saga of considerable drama itself. It offers a clear and entertaining window onto immigrant life in Texas and the issues that shaped women's lives and elicited their talents in an earlier century.

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

As historian Gunnar Nerheim states in his introduction, “Norway is a foreign country to Texans, and Texas is a foreign country to Norwegians. Neither in Norway nor Texas has there been any awareness that so many Norwegians settled in antebellum Texas.” Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas brings Norwegian settlement in Texas to light and in doing so offers the first-ever comprehensive history of Norwegians in Texas.Fluent in both English and Norwegian, Nerheim has done what no other historian has done by combining primary and secondary sources from both languages and both countries. A well-established European scholar, Nerheim examines these never-before-referenced sources, telling the story of Norwegian immigration to Texas, explaining the contexts of Norwegian immigration to Texas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and uncovering its significance to the histories of both countries.The larger historical context reveals that immigration to Texas operated as part of dynamic circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic, including slavery and the Civil War. Drawn from the perspectives of both regions, the history of Norwegian settlement in Texas provide new insights into European immigration. Readers interested in Texas, Norwegian, and trans-Atlantic history, as well as nineteenth-century immigration, will find new horizons in Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas.

It may sound simple. Fashion a set of blades, attach them to a generator, set the machine on top of a tower, and let the wind do the work of creating electricity. Not so. Most of these attempts fail, even with the availability of the latest technologies. In Wind Energy Revolution, Christopher C. Gillis Sr. examines the efforts to develop “small” wind generators for use at homes, farms, and ranches following the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.Wind machines were once featured prominently on farms and homesteads throughout the Midwest of the United States and Canada during the late 1910s through the early 1950s in areas that had no access to overhead electric-power transmission lines. As a result of rural America’s connection to the power grid, many of these pioneer wind-electric machines fell “victim” to electrical power lines. Interest in wind energy resurfaced in the early 1970s when energy shortages were created by the Arab Oil Embargo, the rise of environmentalism, and the move toward self-sufficient, off-the-grid living. Early wind-electric machines were dusted off and restored back into service, while several former manufacturers reemerged, and entrepreneurs developed new designs.Political and societal interest in renewable energies—wind and solar—began to wane in the early 1980s and did not return until the late 1990s. Even so, the developments in the 1970s influenced how Americans subsequently viewed and used renewable power. Wind Energy Revolution is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive history for historians and anyone interested in wind as a viable renewable resource.

“Kaleta has written a deep-fried, wide-eyed American saga of family and food.”—Davia Nelson of NPR’s award winning Kitchen Sisters“Fun and detailed glimpse into the history of an American snack-food icon.”—Rob DeWalt, New Mexico-based food writer “Fritos® Pie is a well-written book covering a subject which in some way touches everyone. . . . The book is more than a business matter, it deals with family and memories.”—Jerry Turner, Mexia News“Doolin uses her access to the extensive Frito-Lay archives well, and the advertising that she shares provides a useful time-line of both Frito-Lay history, as well as advertising trends of the last fifty years. . . . For those interested in Texas food history, this book is certainly worth a look.”—Melissa Prycer, Legacies

From 1802 to 1813, Nemesio Salcedo served as commandant general of the Spanish Internal Provinces, making him the preeminent military and civil authority over a roughly 1.5 million square mile region that stretched from the western bank of the Mississippi River to the eastern border of modern California and south to what is today north-central Mexico. As commandant general, Salcedo's duty was to keep the peace with indigenous peoples, promote economic and population growth, and maintain Spanish sovereignty over western North America during the most tumultuous time in the history of western North America.Trouble began in 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase placed an ambitious and expansionist United States on the doorstep of the Internal Provinces. With inadequate resources Salcedo was forced to oppose what the Spanish regarded as illegal expeditions by the likes of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike, led by American General James Wilkinson. Smugglers, escaped enslaved people, hostile Native American tribes, and even the subversive efforts of agents sent by Napoleon and former US Vice President Aaron Burr further destabilized the border and threatened Salcedo's rule.Amid crises, Salcedo pursued progressive initiatives that placed him among the most forward-thinking people of his day. He initiated a smallpox inoculation program that saved incalculable lives, established the first school for girls in western North America, and sponsored scientific expeditions meant to map, measure, and better understand the lands and peoples under Spanish claim.On a level with Thomas Jefferson, Miguel Hidalgo, and Napoleon Bonaparte, Nemesio Salcedo reshaped the geopolitics of the American west in the early nineteenth century. The Gatekeeper: Nemesio Salcedo and the North American West introduces readers to an important, yet heretofore less recognized leader during a period of profound change.