Books published by publisher Texas Christian University Press

Drawing upon the increasing popularity of graphic or illustrated novels among young readers, Texas Tales Illustrated: The Revolution is an innovative retelling of the Texas revolution for independence, sure to become an invaluable classroom resource. Author Mike Kearby and illustrator Mack White designed the book for use in seventh grade Texas history courses in response to a need for more interactive textbooks, which will appeal to the learning styles of students in today’s overwhelmingly visual media culture. White’s detailed line drawings recall classic comic book style and capture the dramatic tension of the battles, while Kearby’s narration is enticing, full of intriguing historical detail. The comic pages are supplemented with traditional text, including excerpts of historical documents and visual materials such as maps and battlefield schematics. Students at three North Texas middle schools found the graphic format “easy to read,” the illustrations “exciting” and well executed. Many responded that they would check out the book from their school libraries—even if the text were not required reading.

Recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Dawoud Bey has created a body of photography that masterfully portrays the contemporary American experience on its own terms and in all of its diversity.Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply offers a forty-year retrospective of the celebrated photographer’s work, from his early street photography in Harlem to his current images of Harlem gentrification. Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States. Leading curators and critics—Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, David Travis, Hilton Als, Jacqueline Terrassa, Rebecca Walker, Maurice Berger, and Leigh Raiford—introduce each series of images.Revealing Bey as the natural heir of such renowned photographers as Roy DeCarava, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and James Van Der Zee, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply demonstrates how one man’s search for community can produce a stunning portrait of our common humanity.

Modern Texas, like Mexico, traces its beginning to sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Indians who contested control over a vast land. Unlike Mexico, however, Texas eventually received the stamp of Anglo-American culture, so that Spanish contributions to present-day Texas tend to be obscured or even unknown. The first edition of Spanish Texas, 1519–1821 (1992) sought to emphasize the significance of the Spanish period in Texas history. Beginning with information on the land and its inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans, the original volume covered major people and events from early exploration to the end of the colonial era.This new edition of Spanish Texas has been extensively revised and expanded to include a wealth of discoveries about Texas history since 1990. The opening chapter on Texas Indians reveals their high degree of independence from European influence and extended control over their own lives. Other chapters incorporate new information on La Salle's Garcitas Creek colony and French influences in Texas, the destruction of the San Sabá mission and the Spanish punitive expedition to the Red River in the late 1750s, and eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms in the Americas. Drawing on their own and others' research, the authors also provide more inclusive coverage of the role of women of various ethnicities in Spanish Texas and of the legal rights of women on the Texas frontier, demonstrating that whether European or Indian, elite or commoner, slave owner or slave, women enjoyed legal protections not heretofore fully appreciated.

Roland Thaxter Bird, universally and affectionately known to friends and associates as R. T., achieved a kind of Horatio Alger success in the scientific world of dinosaur studies. Forced to drop out of school at a young age by ill health, he was a cowboy who traveled from job to job by motorcycle until he met Barnum Brown, Curator of Vertebrae Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a leader in the study of dinosaurs. Beginning in 1934, Bird spent many years as an employee of the museum and as Brown's right-hand man in the field. His chart of the Howe Quarry in Wyoming, a massive sauropod boneyard, is one of the most complex paleontological charts ever produced and a work of art in its own right. His crowning achievement was the discovery, collection, and interpretation of gigantic Cretaceous dinosaur trackways along the Paluxy River near Glen Rose and at Bandera, Texas. A trackway from Glen Rose is on exhibit at the American Museum and at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. His interpretation of these trackways demonstrated that a large carnosaur had pursued and attacked a sauropod, that sauropods migrated in herds, and that, contrary to then-current belief, sauropods were able to support their own weight out of deep water. These behavioral interpretations anticipated later dinosaur studies by at least two decades.From his first meeting with Barnum Brown to his discoveries at Glen Rose and Bandera, this very human account tells the story of Bird's remarkable work on dinosaurs. In a vibrantly descriptive style, Bird recorded both the intensity and excitement of field work and the careful and painstaking detail of laboratory reconstruction. His memoir presents a vivid picture of camp life with Brown and the inner workings of the famous American Museum of Natural History, and it offers a new and humanizing account of Brown himself, one of the giants of his field.Bird's memoir has been supplemented with a clear and concise introduction to the field of dinosaur study and with generous illustrations which delineate the various types of dinosaurs.

In May 1970, aerial photographs revealed what U.S. military intelligence believed was a POW camp near the town of Son Tay, twenty-three miles west of North Vietnam’s capital city. When American officials decided the prisoners were attempting to send signals, they set in motion a daring plan to rescue the more than sixty airmen thought to be held captive.On November 20, a joint group of volunteers from U.S. Army Green Berets and U.S. Air Force Special Operations Forces perfectly executed the raid, only to find the prisoners' quarters empty; the POWs had been moved to a different location. Initially, the Son Tay raid was a devastating disappointment to the men who risked their lives to carry it out. Many vocal critics labeled it as a spectacular failure of our nation’s intelligence network. However, subsequent events proved that the audacity of the rescue attempt stunned the North Vietnamese, who implemented immediate changes in the treatment of their captives. The operation also restored the prisoners’ faith that their nation had not forgotten them.John Gargus not only participated in the planning phase of the Son Tay rescue, but also flew as a lead navigator for the strike force. This revised edition incorporates the most recent information from raid participants and also includes recent translations of North Vietnamese perspectives. No previous account of this top-secret action has given such a full account or such insight into both the execution and the aftermath of Son Tay.

When fifteen-year-old Christina Eudora Von Scholl learns that her family will leave their German homeland to seek freedom in Texas, her greatest sorrow is leaving behind her beloved grandmother. And so, in a series of letters, she takes “Oma” on this great adventure with her family . . . and takes us as readers. Sometimes the letters are dark with discouragement, for the Von Scholls find, as did many German-Texas families, that the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants, known as the Adelsverein, was unable to fulfill its promises of land, housing, horses, and farm implements. But they are Germans, determined and willing to work hard. More often these letters—and the text woven in between them—are bright with adventure, for Tina finds Texas an exciting, if puzzling, place. There are new customs to learn, new foods to eat, even while the family preserves its traditional German ways. Tina’s adventures include a run-in with a mountain lion, an exciting trip across Texas with her father to Sisterdale, and a frightening encounter with Lipan Indians. Her lessons in being an American are helped by Jeff, a young man who becomes part of the family when he undertakes to teach them to farm in Texas. Tina, in return, teaches Jeff to read and learns a lesson in love that is without nationality. Letters to Oma is a charming, informative novel that sweeps the reader back to a very particular time and place. And Tina Von Scholl is irresistible as correspondent and as heroine.

Close on the heels of the American public’s early enthusiasm over the airplane came aviation stories for the young. From 1910 until the early 1960s, they exalted flight and painted the airplane as the most modern and adventuresome of machines. Most of the books were directed at boys; however, a substantial number sought a girls’ audience. Erisman’s account of several aviation series and other aviation books for girls fills a gap in the history and criticism of American popular culture. It examines the stories of girls who took to the sky, of the sources where authors found their inspiration, and of the evolution of aviation as an enterprise open to all. From the heady days of early aviation through the glory days of commercial air travel, girls’ aviation books trace American women’s participation in the field. They also reflect changes in women’s roles and status in American society as the sex sought greater equality with men. As aviation technology improved, the birdwomen of the pre-World War I era, capable and independent-minded, gave way to individualistic 1930s adventurers patterned on Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, and other feminine notables of the air. Their stories lead directly into the coming of commercial air travel. Career stories paint the increasingly glamorous world of the 1940s and 1950s airline stewardess, the unspoken assumptions lying behind that profession, and the inexorable effects of technological and economic change. By recovering these largely forgotten books and the social debates surrounding women’s flying, Erisman makes a substantial contribution to aviation history, women’s history, and the study of juvenile literature. This first comprehensive study of a long-overlooked topic recalls aviation experiences long past and poses provocative questions about Americans’ attitudes toward women and how those attitudes were conveyed to the young.

When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham's article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham's three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 1914–1915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site.Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham's expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the "lost city" took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham's.

Texas Chili? Oh My! is a retelling of the The Three Little Pigs--Texas style! Meet Bluebonnet, Mockingbird, and Sweet Olive, three little armadillos, as they leave Mamadillo's home and build their own dens out of nativeTexan materials. But watch out for Trickster Coyote, always looking for armadillos to make into Texas chili!Texas Chili? Oh My! / Chili Texasb? Ay Dios! was awarded the 2015 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award for the best recently published children's book on Texas history. Children and adults alike will be entertained and educated on Texas symbolsin this beautiful book. Texas Chili? Oh My! also includes a glossary and learning objectives to aid elementary teachers in making Texas history a fun, engaging experience for students.

Memoirs are tricky, especially when the author isn’t widely known. But Janis Stout tackles the memoir with a new and inventive approach—she organizes her memories around the houses she’s lived in. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I picture my life as a long row of houses.” Houses, she claims, are metaphors for the structures of our lives, and Stout’s houses twine their way through this memoir along with reflections on work and retirement, marriages good and bad, and quietness for engaging in the important last work of life. She is, she says, a little different in each house—but each house shaped who she became as she prepared to move into the last house, the house of retirement.A college professor, mother of four sons, and wife, she writes of her early life through the lens of the houses she lived in at the time of events. There was the rock house of her early childhood from which she escaped to a failed early marriage that produced her sons. Other houses enfold her determination to finish college and her PhD; her concern for a son who is blind and brain-damaged; and, finally, a new, happy and enduring marriage.Stout recounts the planning and building of the dream house in the New Mexico mountains, where she and her husband, Loren, would build new lives in retirement. And then their lives take a sudden turn when health issues made the house impractical. New Mexico wasn’t, after all, the last house.

For forty-eight years, Dave South was the radio voice of Southwest Conference and Texas A&M University football, basketball, and baseball. Along the way, he amassed a treasure trove of unforgettable stories, anecdotes, and conversations with noteworthy personalities, both on and off the field. In You Saw Me on the Radio, he collects some of his favorite stories from the broadcast booth, locker room, and other behind-the-scenes locations. This collection of lively tales is organized around themes such as “Memorable Games,” “Players,” “Interviews,” “Goofs,” and “Fans.” These good-natured recollections of a long and colorful career are accompanied by a gallery of photographs gathered from South’s interactions with Aggie sports greats, iconic venues, and other people, places, and events that have created treasured sports memories over almost five decades. With a wink and a generous dose of self-deprecating humor, South relates some of his most embarrassing gaffes and miscues, including the time he conducted an awkward interview with the Treasurer of the United States—while having no idea who she was or what she did. He tells about the infamous “yellow spot” on Kyle Field. He reveals the truth behind “beanie weenies,” the culinary secret weapon of Texas A&M football recruiters. And of course, South pays heartfelt tribute to the coaches, players, fans, and fellow broadcasters who became his friends through the years. Loaded with accounts of unforgettable contests, hilarious moments, and poignant memories, You Saw Me on the Radio is sure to be a favorite for fans of Texas A&M University athletics and sports lovers everywhere.The author’s proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit the Wounded Warrior Project.