Kirjahaku

Spring of 1904. An inexperienced automobile driver jumps the curb and drives into the lobby of the St. George Hotel. The mayor orders a roundup of unlicensed dogs due to a citywide outbreak of rabies. An elevator crushes the head of a young man as he retrieves a half dollar he had dropped down the shaft. Embers from a wood-burning stove transform a sleeping house into a funeral pyre. A ten-year-old boy in City Park has a spike driven into his temple by a playmate with a fence picket. All this in just a few days. Rusty Williams catalogues the heartbreaking and bizarre forms in which death stalked Dallas at the turn of the twentieth century.

The history of New Texas, the Texas we know today—oil-rich, insufferably loud, and unbearably proud of itself—begins in the late 1920s, when a horned frog wakes from its thirty-one-year nap in a courthouse cornerstone and flabbergasts the nation. In slightly over two decades ten individuals—their words, actions, and accomplishments—come to define the New Texas of the twenty-first century. While the history of Old Texas rests on oft-told legends of Houston, Austin, Travis, Crockett, Rusk, Lamar, and Seguin, today’s New Texas—proud, loud, self-promotional, sports-crazy, and too rich for its own good—is the Texas that percolates throughout the nation’s popular culture.In Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash: How Ten Mavericks Created the Twentieth-Century Lone Star State, author Rusty Williams profiles ten largely unsung men and women responsible for the Texas you love, hate, and (secretly) envy today. Sidebar content throughout the book features historic anecdotes and words of wit and wisdom from Boyce House’s numerous speeches and books about Texas.

At the beginning of America’s Great Depression, Texas andOklahoma armed up and went to war over a 75-cent toll bridgethat connected their states across the Red River. It was a twoweekaffair marked by the presence of National Guardsmen withfield artillery, Texas Rangers with itchy trigger fingers, angrymobs, Model T blockade runners, and even a costumed NativeAmerican peace delegation. Traffic backed up for miles, cutting offtravel between the states.This conflict entertained newspaper readers nationwide duringthe summer of 1931, but the Red River Bridge War was a deadlyserious affair for many rural Americans at a time when free bridgesand passable roads could mean the difference between survivaland starvation. The confrontation had national consequences,too: it marked an end to public acceptance of the privately ownedferries, toll bridges, and turnpikes that threatened to strangleAmerican transportation in the automobile age.The Red River Bridge War: How Texas and Oklahoma Armed Upand Went to War Over a Toll Bridge documents the day-to-dayskirmishes of this unlikely conflict between two sovereign states,each struggling to help citizens get goods to market at a time ofreduced tax revenue and little federal assistance. It also serves as a cautionary tale, providing historical context to the current trendof re-privatizing our nation’s highway infrastructure.