Résumé : Exhibitions featuring more than five hundred original artifacts spanning thirteen thousand years and a robust calendar of special exhibitions, films, and programs are the hallmark of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas's official history museum. The Bullock collaborates with more than seven hundred museums, libraries, archives, and individuals to display original historical artifacts and produce exhibitions that illuminate and celebrate Texas history and culture. The book features seventy artifacts that have been on view at the Bullock Museum. Reflecting history, both individually and collectively, the artifacts represent all eras, regions of the state, and genres. The artifacts in the collection range from Texas's quintessential founding documents to items from everyday life, works of art, and objects that show the state as a leader in science and technology. This book does what museums do best, presenting history as artifact, inviting readers to closely examine historical objects and consider how the past shapes the future. - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : Alcatraz—infamous for its legendary inmates—is much more than its grim history. Hidden Alcatraz focuses on the current state of the island fortress, presenting a unique collection of nearly one hundred images taken over a four-year period by thirty-four photographers, including Steve Fritz, Deborah Roundtree, Robert Dawson, Alex Fradkin, Thom Sempere, and Michael Venera. As participants in workshops on “the Rock,” hosted by the National Park Service and Photo Alliance of San Francisco, these photographers were granted unprecedented access, even staying overnight in the main cellblock. The resulting pictures present diverse visions of beauty in decay. They highlight the eerie, almost supernatural mood of the former prison, bringing texture to its historical artifacts and architecture, and evoking the extreme isolation and despair of inmates whose only remaining traces are suggestions of blood spatters and scratches on the walls. Hidden Alcatraz includes a foreword by actor Peter Coyote, who was present during the 1971 occupation by members of the American Indian Movement, and an introduction by John Martini, one of the island’s first park rangers and an expert on its history. - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : In this entertaining history, Gregory McNamee explores the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest. He traces the origins of the cuisine to the arrival of humans in the Americas, the work of the earliest farmers of Mesoamerica, and the most ancient trade networks joining peoples of the coast, plains, and mountains. From the ancient chile pepper and agave to the comparatively recent fare of sushi and Frito pie, this complex culinary journey involves many players over space and time. Born of scarcity, migration, and climate change, these foods are now fully at home in the Southwest of today—and with the “southwesternization” of the American palate at large, they are found across the globe. McNamee extends that story across thousands of years to the present, even imagining what the southwestern menu will look like in the near future. - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : L'auteur relate un événement de la fin des années 1950. Il évoque comment Elizabeth Eckford, jeune adolescente noire de 15 ans, et huit camarades ont dû faire face à une foule en colère et à l'armée parce qu'ils étaient inscrits au lycée blanc de la ville de Little Rock, dans l'Arkansas. T. Snégaroff a rencontré plusieurs de ces lycéens et raconte leur lutte pour l'intégration raciale. ©Electre 2018

Résumé : Panorama sur la Louisiane française, de la première expédition de Cavelier de La Salle en 1669 à sa vente aux Etats-Unis par Bonaparte en 1803. La vallée du Mississippi fut l'axe de pénétration de la France sur le territoire américain et le point de départ de la première conquête de l'Ouest, menée par des missionnaires, des coureurs des bois et des officiers français. ©Electre 2018

Résumé : More than half of all Arizonans live in Phoenix, the center of one of the most urbanized states in the nation. This history of the Sunbelt metropolis traces its growth from its founding in 1867 to its present status as one of the ten largest cities in the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of archival materials, oral accounts, promotional literature, and urban historical studies, Bradford Luckingham presents an urban biography of a thriving city that for more than a century has been an oasis of civilization in the desert Southwest. First homesteaded by pioneers bent on seeing a new agricultural empire rise phoenix-like from ancient Hohokam Indian irrigation ditches and farming settlements, Phoenix became an agricultural oasis in the desert during the late 1800s. With the coming of the railroads and the transfer of the territorial capital to Phoenix, local boosters were already proclaiming it the new commercial center of Arizona. As the city also came to be recognized as a health and tourist mecca, thanks to its favorable climate, the concept of "the good life" became the centerpiece of the city's promotional efforts. Luckingham follows these trends through rapid expansion, the Depression, and the postwar boom years, and shows how economic growth and quality of life have come into conflict in recent times. - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : Are you looking to learn more about Texas? Sure, you’ve heard about the Alamo and JFK’s assassination in history class, but there’s so much about the Lone Star State that even natives don’t know about. In this trivia book, you’ll journey through Texas’s history, pop culture, sports, folklore, and so much more ! (...) Whether you consider yourself a Texas pro or you know absolutely nothing about the state, you’ll learn something new as you discover more about the state’s past, present, and future. Find out about things that weren’t mentioned in your history book. In fact, you might even be able to impress your history teacher with your newfound knowledge once you’ve finished reading! So, what are you waiting for? Dive in now to learn all there is to know about the Lone Star State ! - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : The Republic of Texas was founded in 1839, around the time that photography was being invented. So while there were no photographers at the Alamo or San Jacinto, they arrived soon after to immortalize, on film, Sam Houston, David Burnett, Mirabeau Lamar, and many other founding fathers of the Lone Star State. Over the following nearly two centuries, Texas politics and politicians have provided reliable, often dramatic, and sometimes larger-than-life subjects for photographers to capture in the moment and add to the historical record. Picturing Texas Politics presents the first photographic album of Texas politicians and political campaigns ever assembled. Chuck Bailey has searched archives, museums, libraries, and private collections to find photographs that have never been published, as well as iconic images, such as Russell Lee’s pictures of one of Ralph Yarborough’s campaigns. These photographs are arranged into four chronological sections, each one introduced by historian Patrick Cox, who also provides informative photo captions. The photographs display power and political savvy from the early Republic to Lyndon Johnson and Bob Bullock; unmatched dedication to Texas in the Hobby and Bush families; and the growing influence of women in politics, from Miriam “Ma” Ferguson to Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, and Kay Bailey Hutchison. With Sam Houston’s jaguar vest, W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel’s hillbilly band, a famous governor with an ostrich, and prominent Texans eating watermelons, shooting guns, and riding horses, this is Texas politics at its liveliest and best. - Note de l''éditeur

Résumé : The timely interrogation of US-Mexico borderlands holds particular currency where the racialized rhetoric and sexualized violence of the current body politic of the US government is concerned. What with caged Mexican children, privatized US Immigration detention centers, migrant detainee deaths and human rights abuses, and associated patterns of political graft and corruption, the paroxysm of racialized forms of state-sanctioned social violence in the borderlands has morphed into something largely unforeseen a few years ago. Hernández (San Diego State) has produced a stunningly brilliant call to action and an intellectually vibrant interdisciplinary interrogation of the origins, nature, and extent of borderlands violence. Drawing on an interpretive schema centered on coloniality as opposed to colonialism, Hernández dissects and deconstructs the colonial and frontier origins of that deeply ingrained corpus of dehumanizing violence(s) born of an epistemic of racialized and sexualized cultural and sociopolitical constructs. This he contends is the product of “the cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality” born of those colonial systems of racialized/sexualized violence that persist, sans the institutions that originally spawned and propagated their proliferation within the contemporary interstate system of racialized Indigenous oppression and surveillance. - Note de l'éditeur

Résumé : Popular understandings of Texas History often center on men—from Spanish conquistadors and fighters at the Alamo to oil barons and political titans. Boswell (Henderson State Univ.) provides a welcome balance to this narrative that supplements survey texts. The initial chapter’s coverage of Native American and Spanish colonial Texas is fleeting, although women in this era established patterns of exchange and ideas about property that decisively influenced Texas well into the 19th century. The author offers more detail on the roles of women in the Anglo-American settlement of Texas after 1821 and the plight of women—including African Americans and Tejanas—during subsequent conflicts. The strongest chapters examine women’s activism and labor from 1870 to 1930, with Boswell’s inclusion of a wide range of perspectives from oral histories. This book concludes with an apt observation of the struggles of Texas women in a political landscape that “that expects them to act as 'ladies' while trying to win offices that require them to demonstrate their toughness” (274). This pressure to uphold strict gender norms yet face hardships in ways that confound these restraints provides an overarching theme to this history of women in Texas. - Note de Choice