John Thomas Biggers (1924–2001) was a major African American artist who inspired countless others through his teaching, murals, paintings, and drawings. After receiving conventional art training at Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State, he had his personal and artistic breakthrough in 1957 when he spent six months in the newly independent country of Ghana. From this time forward, he integrated African abstract elements with his rural Southern images to create a personal iconography. His new approach made him famous, as his personal discovery of African heritage fit in well with the growing U.S. civil rights movement. He is best known for his murals at Hampton University, Winston-Salem University, and Texas Southern, but the drawings and lithographs that lie behind the murals have received scant attention—until now. Theisen interviewed Dr. Biggers during the last thirteen years of his life, and was welcomed into his studio innumerable times. Together, they selected representative works for this volume, some of which have not been previously published for a general audience. After his death in 2001, his widow continued to work closely with Theisen, resulting in a book that is intimate and informative for both the scholar and the student.

Transcript of an interview with Denise Bates, an architect and interior designer who works at Gensler, discussing building construction and renovation that employ sustainability and resilient design, and how those concepts and codified standards have changed over time.

Transcript of an interview with Gary Olp, an architect and the founder of GGO Architects (the first green architecture firm in Dallas). He discusses how he became involved in sustainable architecture and with LEED rating systems, as well as his community outreach activities related to various green practices.

John Thomas Biggers (1924–2001) was one of the most significant African American artists of the twentieth century. He was known for his murals, but also for his drawings, paintings, and lithographs, and was honored by a major traveling retrospective exhibition from 1995 to 1997. He created archetypal imagery that spoke positively to the rich and varied ethnic heritage of African Americans, long before the Civil Rights era drew attention to their African cultural roots. His influence upon other artists was profound, both for the power of his art and as professor and elder statesman to younger generations. Olive Jensen Theisen’s long-time commitment to the art of John Biggers resulted from the serendipitous discovery of an early Biggers mural in a school storeroom in the mid-1980s. Theisen immediately recognized the artist, the work, and its significance. She then set about returning The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas to a place of honor and found herself becoming a friend and recorder of John Biggers’s stories and experiences relating to the creation of his other murals too, including Family Unity at Texas Southern University. Containing more than eighty color and black-and-white illustrations, Walls That Speak is a richly illustrated update …

Fort Worth Stories is a collection of thirty-two bite-sized chapters of the city’s history. Did you know that the same day Fort Worth was mourning the death of beloved African American “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald, Dallas was experiencing a series of bombings in black neighborhoods? Or that Fort Worth almost got the largest statue to Robert E. Lee ever put up anywhere, sculpted by the same massive talent that created Mount Rushmore? Or that Fort Worth was once the candy-making capital of the Southwest and gave Hershey, Pennsylvania, a good run for its money as the sweet spot of the nation? A remarkable number of national figures have made a splash in Fort Worth, including Theodore Roosevelt while he was President; Vernon Castle, the Dance King; Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer; Harry Houdini, the escape artist; and Texas Guinan, star of the vaudeville stage and the big screen. Fort Worth Stories is illustrated with 50 photographs and drawings, many of them never before published. This collection of stories will appeal to all who appreciate the Cowtown city.

Born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, Bob Camblin (1928-2010) was an artist, first and foremost. He earned his BFA and MFA degrees from the Kansas City Art Institute. His studies were followed by a Fulbright Fellowship that allowed him a year’s stay in Italy. Returning to the USA, he held teaching positions at the Ringling Museum, the University of Illinois, Detroit Mercy, and the University of Utah before moving to Houston in 1967 to teach at Rice’s new art department. He was active in Houston during the late 1960s through the 1980s, collaborating with Earl Staley and Joe Tate on many projects, including “happenings” on the beach in Galveston. His career led him to creative undertakings all over the world. Throughout his lifetime he constantly experimented with various art media. He remained open to new ideas and new techniques until his death in Louisiana in 2010. Camblin was a central figure in the period of artistic fermentation in Houston that is now beginning to receive increasing critical attention. He chose Rowland to be his historian while still at Rice, and her insights into him are based on many personal letters and conversations. In addition, she is a trained art historian and …

Frank Reaugh (1860–1945; pronounced “Ray”) was called “the Dean of Texas artists” for good reason. His pastels documented the wide-open spaces of the West as they were vanishing in the late nineteenth century, and his plein air techniques influenced generations of artists. His students include a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century Texas painters: Alexandre Hogue, Reveau Bassett, and Lucretia Coke, among others. He was an advocate of painting by observation, and encouraged his students to do the same by organizing legendary sketch trips to West Texas. Reaugh also earned the title of Renaissance man by inventing a portable easel that allowed him to paint in high winds, and developing a formula for pastels, which he marketed. A founder of the Dallas Art Society, which became the Dallas Museum of Art, Reaugh was central to Dallas and Oak Cliff artistic circles for many years until infighting and politics drove him out of fashion. He died isolated and poor in 1945. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Reaugh, through gallery shows, exhibitions, and a recent documentary. Despite his importance and this growing public profile, however, Rounded Up in Glory is the first full-length biography. Michael Grauer argues for Reaugh’s …

Adolphe Gouhenant tells the story of artist, revolutionary, and early North Texas resident Francois Ignace (Adolphe) Gouhenant (1804-1871). Gouhenant was selected by well-known Icarian communist Etienne Cabet to lead an advance guard from France to settle a utopian colony in North Texas. The community, beset by hardships, ultimately scapegoated Gouhenant, accused him of being a French agent, and expelled him. He then journeyed first to Fort Worth to teach the federal soldiers French and art, and next to Dallas, where he founded the town’s first arts establishment in the 1850s. Gouhenant set up shop as a daguerreotypist and photographed the town’s early residents. His Arts Saloon was the scene of many exhibitions and dances but ultimately became the high stake in a nasty battle among Dallas’s leading citizens, setting legal precedent for Texas homestead law.

Interview with Alan Taniguchi, former Dean of Architecture at UT-Austin and a Japanese-American internee during WWII, from Brentwood, California. Taniguchi discusses his family and childhood, experiences of racism, the attack on Pearl Harbor and its effects, having his home raided by the FBI, his father's detention and that of Japanese community leaders, preparing for internment, moving to the Gila Relocation Camp in Arizona, life there, leaving the camp for resettlement in Detroit, and life afterwards.

Transcript of an interview with Charles Ray Stokes, former Director of Development and Curator of Special Collections for Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine. Stokes discusses his professional background and the creation of TCOM. This interview was conducted for Richard Rafe's dissertation "The Historical Development of Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine as a State Medical School, 1960-1975."

The musical career of Alexander Tumanov extends from Stalinist and Soviet Russia through contemporary Canada, and as such provides an inspiring portrait of one person’s devotion to his art under trying circumstances. Tumanov was a founding member of Moscow’s Madrigal Ensemble of early music, which introduced Renaissance and Baroque music to the Soviet Union. The Ensemble enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, despite occasional official disapproval by the Soviet bureaucracy. At times the compositions of the group’s founder, Andrei Volkonsky, were banned. Volkonsky eventually emigrated to escape the oppressive conditions, followed soon after, in 1974, by Tumanov, and the Madrigal Ensemble continued in a changed form under new leaders. The story of the author's subsequent life and career in Canada provides a poignant point of contrast with his Soviet period — at the musical, academic, and political levels. This book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of music and intellectual life in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century and is the first published book on the Madrigal Ensemble.

On August 1, 1966, Charles Joseph Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. During the previous evening he had killed his wife and mother, bringing the total to sixteen people dead and at least thirty-one wounded. The murders spawned debates over issues which still plague America today: domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, military indoctrination, the insanity defense, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and public safety. "An outstanding job of chronicling one of the most significant cases in the annals of American crime. . . . Lavergne skillfully researched, documented, and analyzed a case that in many ways defined the concept of ‘mass murder’ . . . will likely become a classic in anyone’s library of true crime editions."--James Alan Fox, Dean of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, and an authority on mass murder

The Boardinghouse is an account of how a diverse group of high spirited, self-assured, talented youths were able to meld in supporting one another during Vogel’s first year as a student at the Chicago Art Institute’s School of Fine Art during the desperate times of the great depression. The book portrays one year in the lives of eighteen young men from various parts of the country who shared similar dreams of becoming an artist. In this Artist Community House, under the charge of Malcolm Hackett, some of the other young art students included Don Goodall, later to become Chairman of the Art Department at the University of Southern California and then the University of Texas at Austin; Gibson Danes, later to become chairman of the Art Department at UCLA and then Yale School of Art and Archeology; Dick Shaw who later would work on such cartoons as “Grin and Bear It,” and “Mr. Magoo.”

Donald Vogel arrived in Dallas at the beginning of World War II after a sojourn at the Art Institute of Chicago. “The feeling of space, its clear clean atmosphere, the calm courtesy of the people and promises of growth all gave hope to a young, would-be painter. What I could not have anticipated was that there would be no gentle growth: it exploded in every direction and the money followed.” Along with the wealth came East Coast art dealers who followed the oil field trails throughout Oklahoma and Texas. They brought dubious art and fake old masters, but the same growth that attracted disreputable dealers also made it possible for Vogel to be part of bringing fine works of art to Dallas, first at the Betty McLean Gallery and later at his own Valley House Gallery. In the words of Dechard Turner, “The Gallery opened the doors to the highest levels of sophistication in art. Not all entered, but the triumph of the Vogel story is that many did!” Already established as a painter, Vogel soon became the outlet in Dallas of art dealers in the United States and Europe. He has been an important part of the Dallas art …

Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell has spent the better part of the last five decades helping Texans rediscover their history, producing a stream of definitive works on the social, political, and economic structures of the Texas past. Through meticulous research and terrific prose, Campbell’s collective work has fundamentally remade how historians understand Texan identity and the state’s southern heritage, as well as our understanding of such contentious issues as slavery, westward expansion, and Reconstruction. Campbell’s pioneering work in local and county records has defined the model for grassroots research and community studies in the field. More than any other scholar, Campbell has shaped our modern understanding of Texas. In this collection of seventeen original essays, Campbell’s colleagues, friends, and students offer a capacious examination of Texas’s history—ranging from the Spanish era through the 1960s War on Poverty—to honor Campbell’s deep influence on the field. Focusing on themes and methods that Campbell pioneered, the essays debate Texas identity, the creation of nineteenth-century Texas, the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the remaking of the Lone Star State during the twentieth century. Featuring some of the most well-known names in the field—as well as rising stars—the volume offers the latest scholarship …

Higher Education in Texas is the first book to tell the history, defining events, and critical participants in the development of higher education in Texas from approximately 1838 to 1970. Charles Matthews, Chancellor Emeritus of the Texas State University System, begins the story with the land grant policies of the Spanish, Mexicans, Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas that led to the growth of Texas. Religious organizations supplied the first of many colleges, years before the Texas Legislature began to fund and support public colleges and universities. Matthews devotes a chapter to the junior/community colleges and their impact on providing a low-cost education alternative for local students. These community colleges also played a major role in economic development in their communities. Further chapters explore the access and equity in educating women, African Americans, and Hispanics.

After he died, Townes Van Zandt found the success that he sabotaged throughout his short life despite the release of sixteen brilliant albums. Since his death, numerous albums both by and in honor of him have been released and many critical articles published, in addition to several books (including Robert Hardy’s A Deeper Blue by UNT Press). For the Sake of the Song collects ten essays on Townes Van Zandt from a variety of approaches. Contributors examine his legacy; his use of the minor key; his reception in the Austin music scene; and an exploration of his relationship with Richard Dobson, with whom he toured as part of the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys. An introduction by editors Ann Norton Holbrook and Dan Beller- McKenna provides an overview of Van Zandt’s literary excellence and philosophical wisdom, rare among even the best songwriters.

John Gregory Bourke kept a monumental set of diaries as aide-de-camp to Brigadier General George Crook. This fifth volume opens at Fort Wingate as Bourke prepares to visit the Navajos. Next, at the Pine River Agency, he is witness to the Sun Dance, where despite his discomfort at what he saw, he noted that during the Sun Dance piles of food and clothing were contributed by the Indians themselves, to relieve the poor among their people. Bourke continued his travels among the Zunis, the Rio Grande pueblos, and finally, with the Hopis to attend the Hopi Snake dance. The volume concludes at Fort Apache, Arizona, which is stirring with excitement over the activities of the Apache medicine man, Nakai’-dokli’ni, which Bourke spelled Na Kay do Klinni. This would erupt into bloodshed less than a week later. Volume Five is particularly important because it deals almost exclusively with Bourke’s ethnological research. Bourke’s account of the Sun Dance is particularly significant because it was the last one held by the Oglalas. The volume is extensively annotated and contains a biographical appendix on Indians, civilians, and military personnel named.

This anthology collects the winners of the 2019 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Eli Saslow, “It Was My Job, and I Didn’t Find Him” (The Washington Post), narrates the life of a former officer at the Parkland high school shooting. Second place: Elizabeth Bruenig, “What Do We Owe Her Now?” (The Washington Post), is the story of a high school rape victim who received no justice. Third place: Hannah Dreier, “The Disappeared” (ProPublica), follows a mother who lost her teenage son to gang violence. Runners-up include Jamie Thompson, “Standoff” (The Dallas Morning News); Lane DeGregory, “Lincoln’s Shot” (Tampa Bay Times); Jenna Russell, “The World, the Stage, the Way Ahead” (The Boston Globe); Evan Allen, “Under a Dark Sky, a Baby is Born” (The Boston Globe); Lisa Gartner, “She’s Taught at the Parkland High School for 14 Years. Can She Go Back?” (Tampa Bay Times); Claire McNeill, “So You Remember the Student Who Was Shot at FSU? He’s Pretty Sure We’ve All Moved On” (Tampa Bay Times); and Bethany Barnes, “Targeted” (The Oregonian).

Texan Identities rests on the assumption that Texas has distinctive identities that define “what it means to be Texan,” and that these identities flow from myth and memory. What constitutes a Texas identity and how may such change over time? What myths, memories, and fallacies contribute to making a Texas identity? Are all the myths and memories that define Texas identity true or are some of them fallacious? Is there more than one Texas identity? The discussion begins with the idealized narrative and icons revolving around the Texas Revolution, most especially the Alamo. The Texas Rangers in myth and memory are also explored. Other essays expand on traditional and increasingly outdated interpretations of the Anglo-American myth of Texas by considering little known roles played by women, racial minorities, and specific stereotypes such as the cattleman. The contents include: Texan identities / Light Townsend Cummins and Mary L. Scheer -- Line in the sand, lines on the soul / Stephen L. Hardin -- Unequal citizens / Mary L. Scheer -- The Texas Rangers in myth and memory / Jody Edward Ginn -- On becoming Texans / Kay Goldman -- Ethel Tunstall Drought / Light Townsend Cummins -- W. W. Jones of …

Voudou (an older spelling of voodoo)—a pantheistic belief system developed in West Africa and transported to the Americas during the diaspora of the slave trade—is the generic term for a number of similar African religions which mutated in the Americas, including santeria, candomble, macumbe, obeah, Shango Baptist, etc. Since its violent introduction in the Caribbean islands, it has been the least understood and most feared religion of the New World—suppressed, out-lawed or ridiculed from Haiti to Hattiesburg. Yet with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston's accounts more than a half-century ago and a smattering of lurid, often racist paperbacks, studies of this potent West African theology have focused almost exclusively on Haiti, Cuba and the Caribbean basin. American Voudou turns our gaze back to American shores, principally towards the South, the most important and enduring stronghold of the voudou faith in America and site of its historic yet rarely recounted war with Christianity. This chronicle of Davis' determined search for the true legacy of voudou in America reveals a spirit-world from New Orleans to Miami which will shatter long-held stereotypes about the religion and its role in our culture. The real-life dramas of the practitioners, true believers and skeptics of …

During World War II the United States mobilized its industrial assets to become the great “Arsenal of Democracy” through the cooperation of the government and private firms. The Dallas Story examines a specific aviation factory, operated by the North American Aviation (NAA) company in Dallas, Texas. Terrance Furgerson explores the construction and opening of the factory, its operation, its relations with the local community, and the closure of the facility at the end of the war. Prior to the opening of the factory in 1941, the city of Dallas had practically no existing industrial base. Despite this deficiency, the residents quickly learned the craft of manufacturing airplanes, and by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack the NAA factory was mass-producing the AT-6 trainer aircraft. The entry of the United States into the war brought about an enlargement of the NAA factory, and the facility began production of the B-24 Liberator bomber and the famed P-51 Mustang fighter. By the end of the war the Texas division of NAA had manufactured nearly 19,000 airplanes, making it one of the most prolific U.S. factories.

In the late 1970s legendary pianist Bill Evans was at the peak of his career. He revolutionized the jazz trio (bass, piano, drums) by giving each part equal emphasis in what jazz historian Ted Gioia called a “telepathic level” of interplay. It was an ideal opportunity for a sideman, and after auditioning in 1978, Joe La Barbera was ecstatic when he was offered the drum chair, completing the trio with Evans and bassist Marc Johnson. In Times Remembered, La Barbera and co-author Charles Levin provide an intimate fly-on-the-wall peek into Evans’s life, critical recording sessions, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the road. Joe regales the trio’s magical connection, a group that quickly gelled to play music on the deepest and purest level imaginable. He also watches his dream gig disappear, a casualty of Evans’s historical drug abuse when the pianist dies in a New York hospital emergency room in 1980. But La Barbera tells this story with love and respect, free of judgment, showing Evans’s humanity and uncanny ability to transcend physical weakness and deliver first-rate performances at nearly every show.

Personal memoir of Stanley Marcus providing anecdotes about his life and family, and also describing his role in the Neiman Marcus department store chain, which was founded by Herbert Marcus (Stanley's father) with his younger sister and her husband, Carrie and Al Neiman. Index starts on page 373.