Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr. (1873-1945), counted Robert Frost among his friends and a member of the inner circle of poets who embraced him and sought his advice. He altered forever the perception of Texas when he created the Texas Folklore Society that continues to record, publish, and promote Texas history, myth, music, and customs. He guided J. Frank Dobie back into The University of Texas fold, where Dobie produced his finest work and established a voice for Texas literature. L. W. Payne, Jr., influenced generations of American school children through his anthologies that became basic English textbooks. Drawing upon Payne’s own writing, interviews with former colleagues and students, and private letters lain undisclosed since Payne’s death, Rare Integrity reveals a portrait of a man whose great gift of creative generosity and warmth of heart enabled him to see a person as the person wished to be seen.

This collection of essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son developed from a research-oriented, upper- division University of North Texas Honors College course, spring 2015. It contains the following seven chapters: Chapter I: The Cognitive Dissonance of Bigger Thomas (by Rachel Martinez) Chapter II: The Equal of Them: Violence and Equality in Native Son and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (by Molly Riddell) Chapter III: Above the Sceptered Sway: Holy Justice, and the Trials of Bigger and Shylock (by Alberto Puras) Chapter IV: Through His Eyes: Critical Analysis of Wright’s Native Son and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (by Rachel Torres) Chapter V: Perceptual Misadventure: Becoming Rather than Enacting the Stereotype in Wright’s Native Son and Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (by Stormie Garza) Chapter VI: Psychologically Rather than Physically Dismembered: Reconsideration of Self-conception in Native Son and Moby-Dick (by Yacine Ndiaye) Chapter VII: Specious Dialectic in Wright’s Native Son (by Nicholas Grotowski). The student authors have exhibited burgeoning skills as historical contextualists, mindful of the author’s times, social circumstance, personal reading, narrative point of view, and aesthetic achievement, evidenced by six of these essays having been accepted for presentation at the annual conference of the American Studies Association of Texas.

Historical account of musicians in Texas, grouped by region, describing "underappreciated" artists as well as some famous artists. Each chapter provides anecdotes and biographical information about an artist or musical group. Index starts on page 299.

William L. Wright (1868–1942) was born to be a Texas Ranger, and hard work made him a great one. Wright tried working as a cowboy and farmer, but it did not suit him. Instead, he became a deputy sheriff and then a Ranger in 1899, battling a mob in the Laredo Smallpox Riot, policing both sides in the Reese-Townsend Feud, and winning a gunfight at Cotulla. His need for a better salary led him to leave the Rangers and become a sheriff. He stayed in that office longer than any of his predecessors in Wilson County, keeping the peace during the so-called Bandit Wars, investigating numerous violent crimes, and surviving being stabbed on the gallows by the man he was hanging. When demands for Ranger reform peaked, he was appointed as a captain and served for most of the next twenty years, retiring in 1939 after commanding dozens of Rangers. Wright emerged unscathed from the Canales investigation, enforced Prohibition in South Texas, and policed oil towns in West Texas, as well as tackling many other legal problems. When he retired, he was the only Ranger in service who had worked under seven governors. Wright has also been honored as an …

The selected Horse Photos in this book represent samples images produced by the two most prolific equine photographers, Ray Bankston and Don Shugart between 1962 and 2000. While Ray Bankston and Don Shugart traveled extensively, many of their clients, including prominent ranches and prestigious performance horse events, were located in Texas, home of the American Quarter Horse Association, the National Cutting Horse Association, and the American Paint Horse Association. In addition to formal portraits of famous horses and their owners and riders, their photo collections also contain never-before-published informal shots of riders and horse-show exhibitors, as well as those of farms, ranches, rodeo arenas, and performance rings of a bygone era. Where available, the dates when horses were photographed are noted, as well as the names of their owners, riders, trainers, and the ranches and farms that represent them.

In 1942, Colonel Curtis E. LeMay and his 305th Bomb Group left Syracuse, New York, bound for England, where they joined the Eighth Air Force and Royal Air Force in war against Germany and her allies. Over the next three years LeMay led American air forces in Europe, India, China, and the Pacific against the Axis powers. His efforts yielded advancement through the chain of command to the rank of Major General in command of the XXIst Bomber Command, the most effective strategic bombing force of the war. LeMay’s activities in World War II are well-documented, but his personal history is less thoroughly recorded. Throughout the war he wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, Helen, and daughter, Jane. They are published for the first time in this volume, weaved together with meticulously researched narrative essays buttressed by both official and unofficial sources and supplemented with extensive footnotes. History remembers “LeMay, the Commander” well. From Wright Field, Ohio, to Hokkaido, Japan, will yield a better understanding of “LeMay, the Man.”

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Charles Darwin, a famous Scientist.

Anthology of writing by the ten winners of the 2016 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. The pieces are published in order of places awarded: McCoy, “It Was an Accident, Baby” (1st place); Dreier, “A Child’s Scraped Knee” (2nd place); Baker, “The Power of Will” (3rd place), and runners up, Cox, “A Marine’s Conviction”; Goffard, “Framed”; Thompson, “The Long Way Home”; Kleinfield, “Fraying at the Edges”; Kuchment and Thompson, “Seismic Denial”; Caruba, “55 Minutes”; and Wangsness, “In Search of Sanctuary.”

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Jean Paul Marat, a famous Orator, journalist, and politician in the French Revolution.

A story set in England of an adventure involving thieves, ships, and travelers that follows several people as their fates become intertwined.

A story set in England of an adventure involving thieves, ships, and travelers that follows several people as their fates become intertwined.

An exploration of Christianity set in a large city in the midwestern United States.

This is the story of Victor Rodriguez, star track athlete and San Antonio educator. From his earliest days in South Texas in the 1940s he broke many barriers. As a football player and track star he set records and won trophies at Edna High School, at Victoria College, and at North Texas State College. At each stage of his education, he often found himself the only Mexican American in his group. He developed his sports prowess from nine years of early morning running to the church in Edna, to ring the bell before Mass. He earned the first Hispanic scholarships as an athlete at both Victoria Junior College and North Texas State College. After graduating in 1955, he began a career in the San Antonio School District, ultimately retiring in 1994 after twelve years as Superintendent of the District. As a pioneer Mexican American educator in San Antonio, he brought dignity and respect to the people of the Westside, where he remains a role model today.

Biography of Marie Antoinette, starting with the death of Charles VI, emperor of Austria, in 1770. It includes a description of her childhood, her life as queen, and her trial and execution. Each chapter heading includes a short summary of events.

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.

This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2012 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which is hosted by the Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas. The contest honors exemplary narrative work and encourages narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across the United States.

Denton County and the City of Denton are named for pioneer preacher, lawyer, and Indian fighter John B. Denton, but little has been known about him. He was an orphan in frontier Arkansas who became a circuit-riding Methodist preacher and an important member of a movement of early settlers bringing civilization to North Texas. After becoming a ranger on the frontier, he ultimately was killed in the Tarrant Expedition, a Texas Ranger raid on a series of villages inhabited by various Caddoan and other tribes near Village Creek on May 24, 1841. Denton’s true story has been lost or obscured by the persistent mythologizing by publicists for Texas, especially by pulp western writer Alfred W. Arrington. Cochran separates the truth from the myth in this meticulous biography, which also contains a detailed discussion of the controversy surrounding the burial of John B. Denton and offers some alternative scenarios for what happened to his body after his death on the frontier.

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Thomas H. Huxley, a famous Scientist.

Donald Lee Thomas was born in Dallas, Texas in 1943. Before graduating high school he enlisted, at age 17, in the U.S. Navy, serving several tours of duty before being ordered to Vietnam in 1968. There he served as part of Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportable ONE, a joint Navy and Marine Corps crew which operated an experimental infl atable hospital with jet turbine engines. He was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal with Combat “V” for his service in Vietnam. In 1972 Mr. Thomas graduated with a Master’s degree in Library and Information Sciences from the University of North Texas and briefly joined the library faculty of the University of Arizona before being accepted for commissioning in the Navy Medical Service Corp in 1973. In his first commissioned position as Assistant Chairman of the Educational Resources Department at the Naval Medical Center of Bethesda, Maryland his duties included management of the professional library. Mr. Thomas retired from the Navy in 1986 to pursue his interest in librarianship. He served in faculty librarian positions at Baylor Health Science Library and Texas A&M University before taking an administrative position with the Harris County Public Library System where he has responsibility for Financial Services …

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Henry David Thoreau, a famous American transcendentalist philosopher.

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Wendell Phillips, a famous Orator.

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Isaac Newton, a famous Scientist.

Monthly booklet containing a biography of Henry George, a famous Reformer.

Due to advances in resuscitation and defibrillation practices over the past decades, people are returning from the brink of death in numbers unprecedented in human history. Of the millions of people who survive drowning each year, about 20% report a near-death experience (NDE): a reported memory of profound psychological events that contain certain paranormal, transcendental, and mystical features. NDEs are usually hyperreal and lucid experiences dominated by pleasurable feelings and more rarely dominated by distressed feelings. This book presents a summary of 40 years of research on NDEs. It contains 22 drowning NDE accounts and recommendations for how water safety professionals can use NDE-related information in their work with people they successfully resuscitate.