Houston Blue offers the first comprehensive history of one of the nation’s largest police forces, the Houston Police Department. Through extensive archival research and more than one hundred interviews with prominent Houston police figures, politicians, news reporters, attorneys, and others, authors Mitchel P. Roth and Tom Kennedy chronicle the development of policing in the Bayou City from its days as a grimy trading post in the 1830s to its current status as the nation’s fourth largest city. Prominent historical figures who have brushed shoulders with Houston’s Finest over the past 175 years include Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, O. Henry, former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, hatchet wielding temperance leader Carrie Nation, the Hilton Siamese Twins, blues musician Leadbelly, oilman Silver Dollar Jim West, and many others. The Houston Police Department was one of the first cities in the South to adopt fingerprinting as an identification system and use the polygraph test, and under the leadership of its first African American police chief, Lee Brown, put the theory of neighborhood oriented policing into practice in the 1980s. The force has been embroiled in controversy and high profile criminal cases as well. Among the cases chronicled in the book are …

While there is wide scholarship on the Texas Revolution, there is no comparable volume on the role of women during that conflict. Most of the many works on the Texas Revolution include women briefly in the narrative, such as Emily Austin, Suzanna Dickinson, and Emily Morgan West (the Yellow Rose), but not as principal participants. Women and the Texas Revolution explores these women in much more depth, in addition to covering the women and children who fled Santa Anna’s troops in the Runaway Scrape, and examining the roles and issues facing Native American, Black, and Hispanic women of the time. Like the American Revolution, women’s experiences in the Texas Revolution varied tremendously by class, religion, race, and region. While the majority of immigrants into Texas in the 1820s and 1830s were men, many were women who accompanied their husbands and families or, in some instances, braved the dangers and the hardships of the frontier alone. Black, Hispanic, and Native American women were also present in Mexican Texas. Whether Mexican loyalist or Texas patriot, elite planter or subsistence farm wife, slaveholder or slave, Anglo or black, women helped settle the Texas frontier and experienced the uncertainty, hardships, successes, and sorrows of …

Interview with Charles Weldon Burgoon, life-time Denton resident and owner of Weldon's Saddle Shop. The interview includes Burgoon's experiences as a child in Denton, his genealogy, and Denton city and country history. Burgoon gives details about area rodeos, schooling in Denton, his summer job mowing lawns, experience with country living, and other various jobs including leather-working and tooling. He talks about the lack of shotgun shells and metal bathtubs during the Second World War, the courtship and marriage of his wife, the Cowboy Turtle Association, selling hand-made goods at rodeos, the Dallas Sportatorium, and professional wrestling. The interview also includes the opening of Burgoon's saddle shop and western store, Harpool's Farm Store, changes in his saddle shop, and the involvement of his daughter in the saddle shop. Burgoon talks about his son's college years and move to California, rental properties and the effect of the recession, and his thoughts on work ethic. It includes an appendix with photographs, a list detailing the images, and an article on The North Texas State Fair and Rodeo.