A history of the institution of the University of North Texas, featuring photographs of people and events on campus and charting its development from the Texas Normal College to its role in the sciences, mathematics, humanities, social sciences and teacher education, amongst others.

Texas changed enormously in the twentieth century, and much of that transformation was a direct product of social and cultural events. Standard histories of Texas traditionally focus on political, military, and economic topics, with emphasis on the nineteenth century. In Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History editors John W. Storey and Mary L. Kelley offer a much-needed corrective. Written with both general and academic audiences in mind, the fourteen essays herein cover Indians, Mexican Americans, African Americans, women, religion, war on the homefront, music, literature, film, art, sports, philanthropy, education, the environment, and science and technology in twentieth-century Texas. Each essay is able to stand alone, supplemented with appropriate photographs, notes, and a selected bibliography. In spite of its ongoing mythic image of rugged ranchers, cowboys, and longhorns, Texas today is a major urban, industrial society with all that brings, both good and bad. For example, first-rate medical centers and academic institutions exist alongside pollution and environment degradation. These topics, and more, are carefully explored in this anthology. It will appeal to anyone interested in the social and cultural development of the state. It will also prove useful in the college classroom, especially for Texas history courses.

Stanley Marcus declared Helen Corbitt "the Balenciaga of Food." Earl Wilson described her simply as "the best cook in Texas." Lyndon B. Johnson loved her stroganoff and wished she would accompany him—and Lady Bird—to the White House to run the dining room.

In this study of roadside crosses, the first of its kind, Holly Everett presents the history of these unique commemoratives and their relationship to contemporary memorial culture. The meaning of these markers is presented in the words of grieving parents, high school students, public officials, and private individuals whom the author interviewed during her fieldwork in Texas.

Inside Tim Johnston's Irish Girl, readers will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance—of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. The contents include: Dirt men -- Water -- Things go missing -- Antlerless hunt -- Jumping man -- Lucky gorseman -- Up there -- Irish girl.

Spare yet evocative, the poems in Mister Martini pair explorations of a father-son relationship with haiku-like martini recipes. The martini becomes a daring metaphor for this relationship as it moves from the son’s childhood to the father’s death. Each poem is a strong drink in its own right, and together they form a potent narrative of alienation and love between a father and son struggling to communicate. “This is a truly original book. There’s nothing extra: sharp and clear and astonishing. Viva!” —Naomi Shihab Nye, judge and author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle

Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America since 1996, has served the organization for almost thirty years. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including America's Top 200 Women Leaders, Legends, and Trailblazers, awarded by Vanity Fair in 1998. Born in Temple, Texas, she now lives in New York City with her husband, Alex Barbanell. Their leisure time is spent primarily with their combined family of six children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

As an intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, Fred L. Edwards, Jr., was instructed to visit every major ground unit in the country to search for intelligence sources—long range patrols, boats, electronic surveillance, and agent operations. “Edwards found time to keep a journal, an extremely well-written, sharply observed report of his adventures. Along with contemporary postscripts and a helpful historical chronology, that journal is a significant improvement on most Vietnam memoirs. It is the record of a Marine’s on-the-job education.”—Proceedings

Thousands of children are diagnosed with autism each year, with a rate of occurrence of 1 in 150 births, compared to 5 per 10,000 just two decades ago. This astounding escalation has professionals scrambling to explain why the devastating neurological disorder, which profoundly affects a person’s language and social development, is on the rise. Are we simply getting better at diagnosing autism, or is a modern health crisis unfolding before us?

Book describing the history of the Big Thicket region in southeast Texas and discussing the struggles during the 1960s and 1970s between conservationists and timber companies, which led to the establishment of the Texas Big Thicket National Preserve in 1974.

In Roseborough, Jane Roberts Wood returns with a keenly observed tale of bighearted people in small-town Texas. Three weeks after Mary Lou’s Gypsy husband dies, her fourteen-year-old daughter, Echo, runs away. Numbed by grief and grounded only by her job at the Dairy Queen, she impulsively signs up for Anne Hamilton’s single-parenting class at the nearby community college. Anne, complex and passionate, has avoided the risks that come with commitment. Knowing nothing of the stages of grief or the process of recovery, Mary Lou begins a sometimes comic, yet poignant, journey to find Echo. Compelled by Mary Lou’s story and her strange daughter, Anne begins her own journey that can ultimately set her free.

A case study of two brothers, Julius and Wilhelm Wagner, who immigrated to the United States from Baden, Germany. Julius immigrated as part of an early communist group, the "Darmstädters" or "Forty," who established the utopian settlement of Bettina in 1847. His anti-slavery beliefs forced Julius to Mexico during the Civil War, but he returned to Texas after the war. His older brother Wilhelm fled Germany in 1851 as a result of his liberal political beliefs and settled in Texas. He founded a German-language newspaper when he moved to Freeport, Illinois.

The field of corrections comprises three distinct areas of study: institutional corrections (jails and prisons), community corrections (probation and parole), and intermediate sanctions (community service, boot camps, intensive supervision programs, home confinement and electronic monitoring, halfway houses, day reporting, fines, and restitution). Intermediate Sanctions in Corrections is the first non-edited book devoted completely to intermediate sanctions systems and their individual programs. It begins with an overview of the background and foundation of intermediate sanctions programs and then describes in clear detail each program and its effectiveness. Caputo supports every point with thorough and up-to-date research. Jon’a Meyer, an expert on this field, contributes a chapter on home confinement. Aimed at students, scholars, and policymakers, Intermediate Sanctions in Corrections will be used in the many undergraduate criminal justice courses devoted to corrections and intermediate sanctions.

From book jacket: “Mr. Guitar” Chet Atkins called Lenny Breau (1941-1984) “the greatest guitarist who ever walked the face of the earth.” Breau began playing the instrument at age seven, and went on to master many styles, especially jazz. Between 1968 and 1983 he made a series of recordings that are among the most influential guitar albums of the century. Breau’s astonishing virtuosity influenced countless performers, but unfortunately it came at the expense of his personal relationships. Despite Breau’s fascinating life story and his musical importance, no full-length biography has been published until now. Forbes-Roberts has interviewed more than 175 people and closely analyzed Breau’s recordings to reveal an enormously gifted man and the inner workings of his music. “Lenny Breau was, and will always be, a great treasure. We need him today more than ever.” —Mundell Lowe

In the east Texas town of Cold Springs in 1944, the community waits for the war to end. In this place where certain boundaries are not crossed and in a time when people reveal little about themselves, their problems, and their passions, Jane Roberts Wood exposes the heart of each of four families during the last year of World War II. Bound together by neighborhood and Southern customs, yet separated by class, money, and family, they are an unforgettable lot, vibrantly brought to life in this “delightfully perceptive and unabashedly romantic” novel (Sanford Herald). As the war grinds to an end, it becomes the catalyst that drives the inhabitants of Cold Springs across the boundaries that had once divided them, taking them to places both chaotic and astonishing. “A rare novel: intelligent, lyrical, devoid of coyness and manipulative plot turns—a book for old and young.”—Austin American-Statesman

Robert Flynn has gathered twenty-three stories that have hope, faith, and love as their common denominator. They are funny, political, and more than a bit prophetic as well as being superbly crafted. Included in the collection are “The Rest of the Story,” wherein the author retells select Biblical stories and parables supplying heretofore expurgated details with an exquisitely agonizing truth; “Ten Mistakes God Made,” which treats with candor religious politics, elitism, and the unexplained nature of what makes us believe; “The Trouble with Eve” and “Redemption,” which are at heart stories of how one grapples with, avoids, questions, and finally resigns to—love; and “Chicken Soup for the Damned,” a fable corporate biography retelling of the Savior’s story. “Flynn’s prose cuts like St. Michael’s sword slicing through the smug heart of a believer too comfortable in his faith. He is to southern Baptists what Flannery O’Conner is to southern Catholics. He is raw, woolly, and wild-eyed, and very necessary.”—Jill A. Essbaum, Concordia University, author of Heaven

In the nine stories of Let’s Do, various calamities strike ordinary Midwesterners, who cope with a mixture of good intentions and ineptitude. Balancing humor with painful clarity, author Rebecca Meacham pulls readers into the lives of characters who struggle with—and more often against—change. “Rebecca Meacham has one of the freshest voices I've encountered in a long time. Blatantly wise, she creates stories that are deliciously subversive, brave and outrageous, reminiscent of a young Alice Hoffman. As the lives of her characters get derailed, they move with the damaged grace of walking through broken glass on tiptoe. This is a writer whose words speak with emotional resonance about the resilience of the human heart—a beautiful, authentic talent who knows that when you turn life upside down, you get good measures of both trouble and laughter, a lesson the very best writers recognize early.”—Jonis Agee, judge

Powerful and haunting, the ten stories of this debut collection imagine a world where dreams and reality merge, often with dangerous consequences. Michael Hyde explores the relationships between illusion and reality, delusion and clarity, as his characters come to realize that the revelations they wholeheartedly pursue are often not the ones that await them and will move them. A teenage girl obsessed with the death of a classmate hopes to become the killer's next victim, a wayward graveyard attendant punishes the dead for his punishments in life, and a ghostly vision in a garden shed offers a catalyst for one woman's change. "Michael Hyde’s stories are strangely satisfying and satisfyingly strange. They combine the gothic sensibility of Flannery O’Connor and the restrained prose of Raymond Carver. These are tales of love-in-extremis. They should be taken as a tonic before bedtime, to stir up our dreams and awaken our compassion."—Sharon Oard Warner, judge, author of Learning to Dance and Deep in the Heart

Death provides us with some of our very best folklore. Some fear it, some embrace it, and most have pretty firm ideas about what happens when we die. Although some people may not want to talk about dying, it’s the only thing that happens to all of us–and there’s no way to get around it. This Publication of the Texas Folklore Society examines the lore of death and whatever happens afterward. The first chapter examines places where people are buried, either permanently or temporarily. Chapter Two features articles about how people die and the rituals associated with funerals and burials. The third chapter explores some of the stranger stories about what happens after we’re gone, and the last chapter offers some philosophical musings about death in general, as well as our connection to those who have gone before.

When Geraldine Watson’s father was a teenager around the turn of the last century, he spent a summer floating down the Neches River, called Snow River by the Indians. Watson grew up hearing his tales of the steamboats, log rafts, and the flora and fauna of East Texas. So when she was sixty-three years old, she decided to repeat his odyssey in her own backwater boat. Reflections on the Neches is both the story of her journey retracing her father’s steps and a natural and social history of the Neches region of the Big Thicket. The Neches, one of the last “wild” rivers in Texas, is now being subjected to dams. Watson’s story captures the wildness of the river and imparts a detailed history of its people and wildlife. Profusely illustrated with drawings by the author and including maps of her journey, Reflections on the Neches will appeal to all those interested in the Big Thicket region and those indulging a feeling of wanderlust–and float trips–down the river.

Mexican Protestantism was born in the encounter between Mexican Catholics and Anglo American Protestants, after the United States ventured into the Southwest and wrested territory from Mexico in the early nineteenth century. Sea la Luz tells the story of Mexican converts and the churches they developed through the records of Protestant missionaries. Juan Francisco Martinez traces Protestant mission work among the Spanish speaking of the Southwest throughout the nineteenth century. By 1900, about 150 Spanish-speaking Protestant churches with more than five thousand adult members existed in the region. They were rejected by their own people because they were Protestants, but Anglo American Protestants did not readily accept them either because they were Mexican. In spite of the pressures from both their own community and the larger society, they forged a new religious identity in the midst of conquest.

In Big Thicket Legacy, Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller present the stories of people living in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Many of the storytellers were close to one hundred years old when interviewed, with some being the great-grandchildren of the first settlers. Here are tales about robbing a bee tree, hunting wild boar, plowing all day and dancing all night, wading five miles to church through a cypress brake, and making soap using hickory ashes. "The book is a storehouse of history, down-to-earth information, good humor, leg-pulling spoofs, tall tales and all kinds of serendipitous gems . . . Readers inclined to fantasy might like to think of two giant Texas folklorists of the past, J. Frank Dobie and Mody Boatright, nodding and winking their approval of Big Thicket Legacy."—Smithsonian

Originally published in 1979, Geraldine Ellis Watson’s Big Thicket Plant Ecology is now back in print. This updated edition explores the plant biology, ecology, geology, and environmental regions of the Big Thicket National Preserve. After decades of research on the Big Thicket, Watson concluded that the Big Thicket was unique for its biological diversity, due mainly to interactions of geology and climate. A visitor in the Big Thicket could look in four different directions from one spot and view scenes typical of the Appalachians, the Florida Everglades, a southwestern desert, or the pine barrens of the Carolinas. Watson covers the ecological and geological history of the Big Thicket and introduces its plant life, from longleaf pines and tupelo swamps to savannah wetlands and hardwood flats. “This is the work on the plant biology of the Big Thicket.”—Pete A.Y. Gunter, author of The Big Thicket

James M. Davis is a retired businessman who lives in Midland, Texas, with his wife of over six decades, Jean. He served on active duty in the U.S. Army Air Forces for more than two and a half years during World War II, and then in the Air Force reserves until 1961. David L. Snead, the editor, is an associate professor of history at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia and is the author of The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War and George E. Browne: An American Doughboy in World War I.