Born in Millheim, Texas, to a family of German immigrants who moved to Texas in the wake of the 1848 revolution, William Andreas Trenckmann was a teacher, journalist, and publisher who successfully combined his German heritage with a new, distinctly Texan identity. His education was cultivated at the brand new Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, where he distinguished himself as the valedictorian of the first graduating class; he later served on the college's board of directors and was even offered the presidency. From 1907 to 1909, he represented Austin County in the Texas legislature. Trenckmann's lasting contribution to Texas history, however, was the creation of Das Wochenblatt, a German-language weekly newspaper that he edited and published for over forty years. Das Wochenblatt became a popular and respected source of information for German-speaking immigrants, their descendants, and the Texas communities where they lived and worked. Through the paper, Trenckmann advocated for civil liberties and free elections. He also vigorously opposed prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, and later the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. When the United States entered World War I, many German-language publications were suspended or otherwise heavily censored, but Trenckmann's newspaper was granted a rare exemption from the wartime government. From 1931 to 1933, Trenckmann serialized his memoirs, Erlebtes und Beobachtetes, or "experiences and observations." In Preserving German Texan Identity, historians Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner present a revised and annotated translation of those memoirs as a revealing window into the lives of German Texans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Originally published in 1991, this pioneering work in Texas historiography, edited by Walter H. Buenger and the late Robert A. Calvert, placed the intellectual development of Texas History within the framework of current trends in the study of U.S. history. In Texas through Time, twelveeminent scholars contribute evaluations of the historical literature in their respective fields of expertise - from Texas-Mexican culture and African-American roles to agrarianism, progressivism, and the New Deal; from perspectives on women to the urban experience of the Sunbelt boom and near-bust. The cumulative effort describes and analyzes what Texas history is and how it got that way. " Avowedly revisionist . . . a hard-hitting analysis of Texas historiography.' --East Texas Historical Association " An absolute must for research library collections and scholars of Texas history.'--Books of the Southwest " Should be well thumbed by any historian concerned with Texas topics."--Southern Historian " A long-needed assessment of more than a century's worth of books, articles, masters theses, and doctoral dissertations on Texas history. . . . a well-conceived project that will prove to be a godsend for graduate students and their mentors, Texana' collectors, and journalists."--Journal of the West

For more than a century the Houston area has grown steadily and at times spectacularly. The lifeblood of the region's development has been the flow of credit; its heart, the banks that have pumped investment dollars through the economy, and particularly Texas Commerce Bank, one of the city's largest.
From the chartering of Texas Commerce's first predecessor in 1886, the bank's ancestor institutions helped finance the growth of the region's lumber, cotton, and oil industries and played important roles in Houston's civic life. One of them, the National Bank of Commerce, was long controlled by Jesse Jones, secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin Roosevelt and one of the fathers of modern Houston.
In recent decades Texas Commerce again received considerable publicity as one of the fastest growing and most profitable banks in the nation. Since the early 1970s, it acquired more than seventy subsidiary banks throughout Texas and the region.
In their research the authors had complete access to bank records and to current and retired bank officers. The balanced, readable result will fascinate bankers, investors, economic and business historians, and others interested in the economic development of a state region.

The Texas of John Salmon Ford's day demanded men of courage and versatility. Ford was such a man. He came to Texas in 1836, quickly became active in Texas affairs, and remained so until his death in 1897. During his long life, Ford was a practicing physician, adjutant in Colonel Hays's regiment of Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, newspaper editor, explorer and surveyor, state senator, mayor and city marshal of Austin, Ranger captain and Indian fighter, Mexican revolutionary general, Sunday-school teacher, Confederate colonel, mayor of Brownsville, superintendent of the state Deaf and Dumb School, and a charter member, of the state historical society.

Ford was instrumental in getting Texas into the Union and, fifteen years later, in getting her out. After the Civil War he helped frame the new state constitution and place Texas once again in the roster of states. He defended her frontiers in the west against Comanches and in the south against Mexican raiders. The story of his life is one of service to his state. He loved Texas as only an old "Texian" could and stood ready to serve her in any capacity. Texas called on him to serve primarily as a trouble shooter, and he served well.

Although the hero of several dime novels, "Old Rip" has never before been the subject of a complete biography based on historical research. His colorful and adventurous life reflects the growing pains of Texas during the formative years. Ford's life was never dull; neither is his biography.

The forces that turned Northeast Texas from a poverty-stricken region into a more economically prosperous area. Winner, Texas State Historical Association Coral H. Tullis Memorial Award for best book on Texas history, 2001 Federal New Deal programs of the 1930s and World War II are often credited for transforming the South, including Texas, from a poverty-stricken region mired in Confederate mythology into a more modern and economically prosperous part of the United States. By contrast, this history of Northeast Texas, one of the most culturally southern areas of the state, offers persuasive evidence that political, economic, and social modernization began long before the 1930s and prepared Texans to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the New Deal and World War II. Walter L. Buenger draws on extensive primary research to tell the story of change in Northeast Texas from 1887 to 1930. Moving beyond previous, more narrowly focused studies of the South, he traces and interconnects the significant changes that occurred in politics, race relations, business and the economy, and women's roles. He also reveals how altered memories of the past and the emergence of a stronger identification with Texas history affected all facets of life in Northeast Texas.

In 1845 Texans voted overwhelmingly to join the Union. They voted just as overwhelmingly to secede in 1861. The story of why and how that happened is filled with colorful characters, such as the aged Sam Houston, and with the southwestern flavor of raiding Comanches, German opponents of slavery, and a border with Mexico. Texas was unique among the seceding states because of its ambivalence toward secession. Yet for all its uniqueness the story of the secession of Texas has broad implications for the secession movement in general. Despite the local color and the southwestern nature of the state, Texas was more southern than western in 1860. Texans supported the Union or insisted upon secession for reasons common to the South and to the whole nation. Most Texans in 1860 were recent immigrants from southern and border states. They still thought and acted like citizens of their former states. The newness of Texas then makes it a particularly appropriate place from which to draw conclusions about the entire secession movement. Secession and the Union in Texas is both a narrative of secession in Texas and a case study of the causes of secession in a southern state. Politics play a key role in this history, but politics broadly defined to include the influence of culture, partisanship, ideology, and self-interest. As any study of a mass movement carried out in tense circumstances must be, this is social history as well as political history. It is a study of public hysteria, the pressure for consensus, and the vanishing of a political process in which rational debate about secession and the Union could take place. Although relying primarily on traditional sources such as manuscript collections and newspapers, a particularly rich source for this study, the author also uses election returns, population shifts over the course of the 1850s, and the breakdown of population within Texas counties to provide a balanced approach. These sources indicate that Texans were not simply secessionists or unionists. At the end of 1860 Texans ranged from ardent secessionists to equally passionate supporters of the Union. But the majority fell in between these two extremes, creating an atmosphere of ambivalence toward secession which was not erased even by the war.

Few department stores symbolized the aspirations of a community or represented the identity of its citizens in a stronger or more enduring way than Leonards in Fort Worth, Texas. For over fifty years, as the store grew from a cubbyhole across from the Tarrant County courthouse into a retailing behemoth sprawling over six and a half downtown blocks, Marvin Leonard, the store's founder, and his brother Obie ran a store that was always a unique place to shop. The brothers used a combination of large volume, low mark-up, and quick turnover to keep prices low and appeal to the common people of Fort Worth and West Texas. Customers also found a stunning array of goods -- fur coats and canned tuna, pianos and tractors -- and an environment that combined the spectacular with the familiar.

But the story of Leonards goes beyond the store and the man who made it. For Marvin Leonard, downtown Fort Worth and Leonards were always intertwined. In the earliest years, Fort Worth's working families and rural West Texans shopped Leonards for bargains, but also because it was Fort Worth's place to meet and greet. As Fort Worth's demographics changed, Leonards created a carnival-like atmosphere that drew customers to the store, even adding its own free subway to ease downtown congestion. Later, downtown's appeal slipped as rural populations declined and rival suburban shopping areas grew, but Marvin Leonard always refused to expand beyond one store and never left downtown.

Leonards gave Fort Worth a special identity, a distinctiveness, and an attraction to the city's center. When Tandy bought Leonards and later sold it to Dillard's, Fort Worth's image and character changed.

This engaging story of aman, a business, and the community the store mirrored and shaped represents local history and biography at their finest.