Historian Mike Cox has been writing about Texas history for four decades, sharing tales that have been overlooked or forgotten through the years. Travel to El Paso during the "Big Blow" of 1895, brave the frontier with Elizabeth Russell Baker, and stare down the infamous killer known as Old Three Toe. From frontier stories and ghost towns to famous folks and accounts of everyday life, this collection of West Texas Tales has it all.

Central Texas is an area as diverse culturally as it is geographically. Bordered by Hill Country in the west, green farmland in the east and Waco and New Braunfels in the north and south, this area has drawn settlers from around the globe for over two centuries, leaving their mark and their stories along the way. From a surprising story of nineteenth-century psych ops at Fort Mason and what really happened to Bevo, the UT longhorn, in 1920 to Mrs. Ross's Croghan Cobbler recipe and rumors of a Lone Star visit by old Abe himself, historian Mike Cox regales readers with over fifty stories about the fascinating people, history and places of middle Texas.

This book features a collection of Mike Cox's Texas history columns, "Texas Tales" which has appeared in a dozen or so different Texas newspapers as well as Texasescapes.com. It focuses specifically on the Big Bend Texas region and showcases local tales of ghost towns, soldiers, historical landmarks, foklore and several other infamous stories of the area.

From the famed Oregon Trail to the boardwalks of Dodge City to the great trading posts on the Missouri River to the battlefields of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars, there are places all over the American West where visitors can relive the great Western migration that helped shape our history and culture. This guide to the Mountain West states of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana--one of the five-volume Finding the Wild West series--highlights the best preserved historic sites as well as ghost towns, reconstructions, museums, historical markers, statues, works of public art that tell the story of the Old West. Use this book in planning your next trip and for a storytelling overview of America's Wild West history.

Secret Newark goes behind the facades of the familiar to discover the lesser-known aspects of the town's fascinating past. Situated on the important old Roman road, the Fosse Way, the ancestral market town grew around the, now ruined, Newark Castle and its large marketplace. Later, during the English Civil War, the town was a hotbed of royalist support and was besieged three times by parliamentarian forces. Today the town serves as a thriving and picturesque site, boasting many heritage attractions and activities. Newark has many secrets, and as you walk along the streets you are walking through history. There are clear reminders of the town's past everywhere, waiting for you to stop, look and listen to their intriguing stories. On a journey through this ancient town, Jillian Campbell and Mike Cox tell these forgotten or untold tales. You may think that you know Newark, but take another look around and you will find more than you could possibly imagine.

Descriptive Metadata for Television is a comprehensive introduction for television professionals that need to understand metadata's purpose and technology. This easy-to-read book translates obscure technical to hands-on language understandable by real people.

Metadata is data about data, or information known about the image in order to provide access to the image. It can be as simple as the subject of an e-mail, but as new technologies emerge and the media world continues to globalize it is getting more and more complex. Metadata is key to today's IT-centric television production environment and this is the first book approaching the subject end to end, from shooting the footage to archiving to consumer set top box.

Al Jennings, if we are to believe him, was for several years a close friend of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), perhaps Americas favorite short-story writer. They met, Jennings claims, as outlaws on the run in Honduras, served time together in the Columbus, Ohio, Penitentiary at the turn of the century, and later met up in New York. Jennings, erstwhile lawyer, bank robber, and Hollywood consultant, was the subject of the 1951 movie ""Al Jennings of Oklahoma"", starring Dan Duryea. Although a suspect narrator at best, Jennings is a masterful storyteller in this 1921 classic. Jennings describes the horrors of prison life so compellingly that the book might have served as a call for prison reform. Yet he also tells how he, O. Henry, and their friends managed to cope. They secured jobs in the prison post office and pharmacy and managed to find a secret room near the kitchen where on Sunday evenings they retired for a fine meal - complete with wine secured from corrupt prison contractors - and good talk. As Jennings recaps their long, philosophical discussions, readers may wish to have joined them in the fancy New York restaurants they were later able to frequent. 'Anyone reading ""Through the Shadows with O. Henry"" will agree that both of the author and his subject were characters worthy of any O. Henry tale' - Mike Cox.

The enormity of Texas's many major disasters are an appropriate match for the state's large size. This is an area of the country where tornadoes are a frequent threat, but in addition to the many violent twisters, residents have experienced fires, floods, drought, blizzards, shipwrecks, and other devastating events, including a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, which earned that year the grim moniker The Year of Death.
Twenty dramatic true stories are retold in this well-researched collection, including:
>The deadly quarter-mile-wide tornado that roared through the town of Goliad in 1902, killing 114 people, injuring 230, and demolishing 150 structures.
>A 1937 natural gas explosion at a school in New London, which blew the whole building into the air and killed 298 students and teachers.
>A 15-foot wall of water that in 1965 swept down the canyon in the West Texas railroad town of Sanderson, killing whole families but uniting the racially divided town in rescue efforts.
>The 1947 explosion of the SS Grandcamp, a French vessel docked in Texas City and laden with ammonium nitrate, which had caught fire and later ignited another ship carrying the same cargo. The two blasts killed 576 people, injured thousands more, and jarred residents of Houston 40 miles to the north.

The history of law enforcement in the Lone Star State goes back well before photography, dating to Texas’ days as part of the Spanish empire. After that Texas became a province of Mexico and for nearly a decade stood among the nations as an independent republic before becoming the 28th state in the Union in 1845. Beyond the contribution to law and order made by constables, sheriffs, town marshals, city police officers, and federal lawmen, Texas is the birthplace of a law enforcement institution unique in the world, the legendary Texas Rangers.  With a selection of fine historic images from his best-selling book Historic Photos of Texas Lawmen, Mike Cox provides a valuable and revealing historical retrospective on this important aspect of Texas history. Remembering Texas Lawmen features more than 125 images of Texas lawmen, bad men (and a few bad women), assorted characters with a law enforcement connection like the legendary Judge Roy Bean, and shots of the places they did their work—for good or bad. Each photograph has a story to tell, and all of the images command attention, many as attention-getting as the business end of a Texas Ranger’s .45.

No story in United States history is more compelling than the exploration and settlement of the American West, and the tales of those who blazed the trails will forever enthrall Americans yet unborn. In Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West, the dauntless adventurers who gave us the legend come alive together in profile. Herein are the early pathfinders Zebulon Pike and Lewis and Clark, James Marshall and men of the gold rush, the lawmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok. George Armstrong Custer returns to the Little Big Horn and John Wesley Powell revisits the Colorado River. And Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill, and Charles Russell breathe the legend to life. A sagely written brush with the lore and romance of the Old West, this roundup of the most famous frontiersmen includes nearly 200 photographs, reproduced vividly in black-and-white, with captions and introductions by author and historian Mike Cox. Here are the fables and the faces of Americans double-tough, for every adventurer seeking an encounter with the great American West.

On January 10, 1901, near Beaumont, Texas, an unremarkable knoll of earth the world would soon call Spindletop shot a geyser of oil a hundred feet into the air, confirming the belief of Pattillo Higgins that black gold lay buried there. The Texas oil industry had begun in earnest, and neither Texas nor the world would ever be the same. In the years to come, Texas oil would fuel the nation’s automobiles and help to bring victory to the Allies in both world wars, shaping America’s destiny throughout the twentieth century. Join author and historian Mike Cox in this photographic visit to the heyday of Texas crude as he recounts the stories of key oil-patch discoveries around the state. Nearly 200 images in vivid black-and-white, with captions and introductions, offer a roughneck-close look at this uniquely American tale of dry holes and gushers, ragtowns and riches, boomtowns, blowouts, and wildcatters gone broke.

The history of law enforcement in the Lone Star State goes back well before photography, dating to Texas’s days as part of the Spanish empire. After that Texas became a province of Mexico and for nearly a decade stood among the nations as an independent republic before becoming the 28th state in the Union in 1845. Beyond the contribution to law and order made by constables, sheriffs, town marshals, city police officers, and federal lawmen, Texas is the birthplace of a law enforcement institution unique in the world, the legendary Texas Rangers. Historic Photos of Texas Lawmen features close to 200 images of Texas lawmen, bad men (and a few bad women), assorted characters with a law enforcement connection like the legendary Judge Roy Bean, and shots of the places they did their work—for good or bad. Each photograph has a story to tell. Some of the images in this volume, coming from the author’s personal collection, are published here for the first time. But all of the images command attention, many as attention-getting as the business end of a Texas Ranger’s .45.

Naturally self-effacing and deferential, Captain John Reynolds Hughes is not as famous today as his publicity-hog contemporary Captain Bill McDonald. Yet, Texas Rangers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries considered him an authentic hero, a straight-ahead lawman that did his job and left the talking to journalists. Hughes became a ranger in 1887, serving in the celebrated Frontier Battalion. In 1900, he won appointment as captain in command of Company D. During his long career he served primarily along the Texas-Mexico border where his word became law. State offi cials subsequently promoted him senior captain, moving his headquarters to Austin. Hughes retired in 1915-having served as ranger and captain longer than any man on the force. This State House Press reprint of Border Boss makes this Texas classic available to a new generation of readers and introduces them to one of the bravest rangers who ever sported the cinco peso.

Texas writer-historian Mike Cox explores the origin and rise of the famed Texas Rangers. Starting in 1821 with just a handful of men, the Rangers' first purpose was to keep settlers safe from the feared and gruesome Karankawa Indians, a cannibalistic tribe that wandered the Texas territory. As the influx of settlers grew, the attacks increased, and it became clear that a larger, better trained force was necessary.

Taking readers through the major social and political movements of the Texas territory and into its statehood, Cox shows how the Rangers were a defining force in the stabilization and the creation of Texas. From Stephen Austin in the early days through the Civil War, the first eighty years of the Texas Rangers were nothing less than phenomenal, and the efforts put forth in those days set the foundation for the Texas Rangers who keep Texas safe today.