Books published by Texas A & M University Press

The chapters in this book (two by former White House speechwriters) give insight into the process of presidential speechwriting, from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to Ronald Reagan's.

When D Burns arrived at the mighty Pitchfork Ranch as the new manager in 1942, he walked straight into the hostility of a lot of longtime hands who did not want to take orders from an outsider. Gradually, though, D and his wife, Mamie, won allies and made a place for themselves on the historic spread. For the next twenty-three years Mamie jotted down stories about the cowhands, the cooks and gardeners at the Big House, the many guests, and her own lively family. Her stories reveal life as it was on an isolated ranch during the war years and the years of change that followed. The Pitchfork is one of Texas' largest and oldest ranches, eighty miles east of Lubbock and a hundred miles north of Abilene. Mamie's reminiscences about life there with her husband, her grandchildren, and the many hired hands needed to run such a spread portray the exuberant informality of chuck-house meals, the color of Christmas dances, and the Forks' grand tradition of hospitality. "My book is about the ranch people," she writes, "more than it is about the ranch's history, or its skunks and rattlesnakes."

Before the discovery of oil and the advent of Progressivism to Texas, the state dealt with prison overcrowding by leasing convicts and their labor to private industry and funneling the profits into the state's coffers. In this book, Donald R. Walker examines economic, social, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas that resulted in the leasing system and its eventual demise. Convict leasing resulted in high mortality rates among prisoners, and stories of abusive guards and intolerable conditions were common. Blacks, who lacked social standing, legal counsel, and the rights to vote, testify, and sit on juries, made up a disproportionate amount of the prison population and were usually sent to work in the fields. In the twentieth century, revenues from the oil industry eased the financial woes of the state, and a movement for social reform gained momentum. Investigative journalism revealed to the public the abuses of prisoners, and in 1912 the state retook control of the prison system. Relying mainly on primary sources, including eyewitness accounts from prisoners, prison records, private correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Walker gives details and statistics of prison management in Texas during that era that will interest scholars of corrections management, Texas, black history, and the South.

The 344 days of combat of the 88th Infantry Division were part of the bitterly contested struggle for supremacy in Italy during the Second World War. Here is the gripping story of the first selective service division committed to battle in the European Theater, seen from the unique vantage point of a battalion physician. Using notes hastily scribbled on the backs of maps and finished out whenever he was rotated to rear areas for rest, Dr. Klaus Huebner captured in his diary the frustration, fear, boredom, devotion, and anger that were the daily portion of combat infantrymen. The result is a remarkably sustained exposition of combat life. Dr. Huebner traces the 88th's activities from final staging preparations at Fort Sam Houston to North Africa and on up the Italian peninsula to the Brenner Pass in Austria, just fifty-five miles south of the Bavarian hamlet where he was born. Combat began for the Division just north of Naples, Italy. During combat, the medical aid station was set up in any available farmhouse, barn, cave, or clump of trees that offered some protection for treating the wounded. There the battalion surgeon and his aides did what they could under adverse circumstances, gave by their presence alone moral support to the casualties, and came to know well the miseries, emotions, and human drama of infantry soldiers in combat. Dr. Huebner writes: "I walked with the men who carried guns and slugged it out on foot. I treated the wounded where they fell." His story is terse and often tense, a memorable view of battle and the men who tried to heal its wounds right in the field

Travel between southwestern towns at the turn of the century was an arduous experience. There were no longer any stagecoaches to carry travelers. Railroads did criss-cross the region, but they did not go through every burg. Motor cars were appearing, but not everyone could afford them. W. B. Chenoweth saw this void in transportation service. He designed a six-cylinder "motor driven stage coach," and in 1907 he coaxed a few passengers into the vehicle for a trip from Colorado City to Snyder, Texas. As soon as passengers became used to Chenoweth's noisy coaches, the dusty paths, and, most important, the quicker trips, motor-coach wildcatters began to crop up across the Southwest. Bus companies grew, merged, and absorbed smaller companies. Author Jack Rhodes has interviewed dozens of owners, executives, drivers, and ticket agents in his research for this book. Those interested in business history or the cultural elements of the era's buses, represented here in dozens of period photographs, will find this an engaging read.

Wave upon wave of newcomers has penetrated the semiarid plains of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Among the settlers and sojourners along the Rio Grande in the mid-eighteenth century were the founders of Laredo, who came seeking survival and permanence in that chaparral country. Established in 1755 as an outpost of New Spain, Laredo, like other borderlands towns, has periodically been buffeted by powerful outside forces that upset the stable society and family unity characteristic of the early villa. Unlike some other border communities, though, it has maintained a prominent Mexican-American political and economic elite. Applying quantitative techniques of demographic analysis and interweaving their results with more traditional narrative, Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa tells the story of a borderlands town and its people. He shows how larger events such as war, economic depression, and changes of sovereignty affected family structure, racial and ethnic divisions, social-class relations, age composition of the population, property ownership, literacy, and other aspects of the daily lives of the townspeople. His conclusions suggest that life in these communities was far from the static, uneventful existence it was once believed to be.

When America entered World War II, the surge of patriotism was not confined to men. Congress authorized the organization of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later renamed Women's Army Corps) in 1942, and hundreds of women were able to join in the war effort. Charity Edna Adams became the first black woman commissioned as an officer. Black members of the WAC had to fight the prejudices not only of males who did not want women in their man's army, but also of those who could not accept blacks in positions of authority or responsibility, even in the segregated military. With unblinking candor, Charity Adams Earley tells of her struggles and successes as the WAC's first black officer and as commanding officer of the only organization of black women to serve overseas during World War II. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion broke all records for redirecting military mail as she commanded the group through its moves from England to France and stood up to the racist slurs of the general under whose command the battalion operated. The Six Triple Eight stood up for its commanding officer, supporting her boycott of segregated living quarters and recreational facilities. This book is a tribute to those courageous women who paved the way for patriots, regardless of color or gender, to serve their country.

Escalante Canyon is a red-walled hole in a geologic uplift (the Uncompahgre Plateau) in western Colorado. Pioneers surging west fell into this canyon hole the way gold nuggets get caught in the potholes of a stream. Like nuggets eddying against stone, they were shaped by the Canyon--rounded off, shattered, or tossed away, according to how they conformed or resisted. Indeed, treasure richer than gold settled into that hole in time; in the onrushing current of history the lifestyle--the Old West--settled and still survives there--in fact, in artifact, and in living memories. The tale of the canyon is a tale of struggle, change, frontier friendship, and enmity that is part of the story of the West itself: Anglo settlement; conflict between cowman, nester, and sheep man; epidemics; hardships; loneliness. Many of its stories, though, are tantalizing episodes unique to this place, laced with oddity and tragedy. Using as digging tools the camera, tape recorder, diaries, memoirs, and a hundred years of old newspapers, Marshall has mined more gold than the first prospectors ever suspected lay in that mysterious red hole.

Shows how Latin American cultures radically transformed, displaced, and subverted Spanish and later European and US cultural impositions. The author theorizes transculturation as the complex process of adjustment and re-creation that allows for fresh configurations to emerge from the clash of cultures and colonial and neocolonial appropriations.

Loneliness pervaded the lives of pioneers on the American plains. In this book, Louis Fairchild mines the letters and journals of West Texas settlers, as well as contemporary fiction and poetry, to record the emotions attending solitude and the ways people sought relief.