Customer Reviews (1)

Probably the Best on the New England True Family.
The book contains literally thousands of the descendants of Henry True who married Israel Pike and came to Salisbury, MA
It includes contributors from all over the country
The book contains some contradictions, etc. but still well worth adding to your Library
Also contains elements of many colateral lines ... Read more

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Kerr County began numbering their probate records about 1862 and Roland Nichols is the first numbered entry. Prior to this numbering system, the earliest probate is for Daniel C. Murphy who was killed in 1856. This volume documents records from that time ... Read more

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Larry McMurtry once wrote that Nelson Algren held the best literary claim to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, though few people realize that "the poet of the Chicago slums" ever lived or wrote here. Yet it was in Depression-era Texas that Algren developed his instinctive need to speak for the powerless--a need that made him one of the foremost chroniclers of the American outcast. The Texas that Algren understood was a world where impoverished people lived among simmering yet casual violence, a world where the law--racist, abusive, and corrupt--ruled with an utter ruthlessness and power. The Texas Stories vividly re-creates this now-vanished world. The collection includes "So Help Me," winner of a 1935 O'Henry Award; "The Last Carousel," which won the 1972 Playboy Fiction Award; and the early "Thundermug," a piece that was censored when it appeared in the radical Windsor Quarterly in 1935. Here too is Algren's unique retelling of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde. Including work from more than four decades, The Texas Stories provides a much-needed overview of Algren's artistic development. It will be enthusiastically welcomed by Algren fans, Texans, literary scholars, Western historians, and many others. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Better examples of his short stoties elswhere
The majority of the short stories in this book areearly attempts of parts of his first novel: Somebody in boots. These stories show the promise of the writer to come, but, unless you are a ardent fan, there are bettercollections of his short stories than this on the market.

30's era "Texas Stories" rings with a contemporary resonance
"The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren." Edited and with an introduction by Bettina Drew. University of Texas Press, 1995

In "Texas Stories", Nelson Algren - the"bard of the stumblebum" best known for his 1949 novel "The Man With The Golden Arm" - peoples his hardscrabble vignettes with the flotsam and jetsam of Depression-era America ; characters who obsessively drift across the desolate and windswept Texas landscape like so many sagebrushes tumbling down the gullies of a prairie ghost town.

But even though the tramps, loners, carnival hustlers, whores, illiterate Okies and Mexican convicts on the run gathered in these 14 short stories and sketches written at different stages of Algren's long career belong to an era long since passed, "Texas Stories" rings with a surprisingly contemporary resonance.

This is because Algren, who died in 1981, blends a sharply honed psychology with his trenchant social protest, avoiding cheap sentimentality by focusing as equally on the tragic-comic and grotesque aspects of his character's motives as he does on the underlying economic and social wrongs that have sent them spinning to their fate.

At his best, in short stories like "Kewpie Doll", the balance works superbly. Here a mundane, almost descriptive account of a boisterous crowd of poverty-stricken rural towns people pilfering a train for winter coal yields sharply to a horrifying conclusion - the decapitation of a child on the tracks as the train takes off, all the more tragic for its seeming randomness.

Curtis Price

Baltimore, USA

cansv@igc.apc.org

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The open range was fenced in long ago, and cattle nowadays ride to market in eighteen-wheel trucks, but ranching remains a proud way of life for many Texans. This volume captures the best of that life in lovely watercolor paintings and an inviting text that traces the history and present-day operations of twelve prominent ranches with deep roots in Texas history. Lawrence Clayton and J. U. Salvant impart the traditions and spirit of each ranch, including the Four Sixes, Green, Iron Mountain, King, Lambshead, Matador, Pitchfork, Swenson, Waggoner, XIT, Y.O., and Yturria. Clayton writes of the timeless round of tasks that ranchers and cowboys perform today as their forebears did and also describes changes in ranching that have taken place over the years. Salvant's watercolors convey an enduring sense of place. She shows both the humble beginnings and the great houses that wealth built, as well as other scenes of ranch life--roundup and branding, supper time around the chuck wagon, and quiet Sunday chores outside the bunkhouse. Through these words and images, readers can enter the world of ranching, a world that surprisingly still lives up to many of its myths. Historic Ranches of Texas is a book that all aficionados of the West will treasure for many years to come. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Limited, but a good start

A correctional counselor, prison grievance officer, county probation officer, and state parole officer turned Associate Professor of History at Texas State University, Dwight Watson argues in his Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990: A Change Did Come that "race complicated the internal impulses for change, change that came as a result of external pressures on the police department" (12). In short, even in the face of change and urban growth, the police department sought to maintain the status quo and physically, psychologically, socially, and verbally discriminated against African-Americans, the main focus of this book, and other ethnic minorities. Twenty-seven oral histories, archival records, and secondary articles and monographs inform this work.

Watson begins by demonstrating that from about 1929 to 1943 an ever-increasing discrepancy existed between the law (namely Jim Crow segregation), the enforcement of these laws, the resistance to these laws, and the ever-visible belief that segregation (like enslavement) was not compatible in large, growing urban areas. As in all eras until the end of this study, Race and the Houston Police Department explains that police were understaffed, either undertrained or not trained at all, and had an on-going reputation that spoke of their brutality and corruption among Houston's black community. After World War II, African-Americans, building on the "Double V Campaign," applied for jobs previously limited to whites. These black officers stood against Jim Crow, yet in other circumstances they were required to enforce Jim Crow. Likewise, they were both respected and hated among other African-Americans. Additionally, the professional judgment's of white and black officers did not receive equal weight and respect. In response to the larger Modern Civil Rights Movement, challenges against segregation and racist police increased in the 1960s. Not unlike other law enforcement agencies across the nation, the Houston Police Department (HPD) responded to an otherwise peaceful protest at Texas Southern University by firing over five thousand rounds into a dormitory in May 1967. During this same time period continuing through the late 1980s, the local government, including the HPD, faced numerous challenges and changes to its leadership. After police murdered Jose Campos Torres by drowning and shot others, it was not just the ethnic minority groups in Houston who did not trust the police; the whites also saw police as a group of "killers and thieves" (109). Watson argues that "a change did come" in the early 1980s with the election of Major Katherine J. Whitmire and her appointment of Lee P. Brown as police chief. As an outsider, Brown, Watson says, brought much needed reform to the HPD.

This monograph has some new and important features, yet there is also a regrettable number of short fallings. Unlike many previous studies on police, this work focuses on the South and on one specific southern city. Importantly, Watson likewise establishes his work historiographically and regularly references other scholarly works. On the other hand, however, for a detailed and new study of a specific region much of Race and the Houston Police Department lacks a human face. The actions and feelings of all the individual actors are not explored. With only 150 pages of text, one wishes that Watson had explored these issues and had provided a great deal of additional examples to discuss how and why racism was practiced in day-to-day life in the HPD and the responses to this. Moreover, this account is too simple and teleological. For example, the appointment of Brown alone would not and could not instantly change the practices and worldview of an organization over a century old. Change results from various combinations of people, events (local and national), time, and place. Even in the twenty-first century, there are regularly voiced concerns about racism in the HPD. In sum, Watson presents important arguments and narratives of a few important events in a readable, concise account. Future scholars have many questions awaiting study and can build on Watson's account.
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paperback guide giving addresses and information for ordering or obtaining information from the Texas State Library. ... Read more