This biography of Sam Houston goes beyond the romantic frontier life of the "buckskin hero from Tennessee" to examine seriously his role as an American statesman.

Glenwood Cemetery has long offered a serene and pastoral final resting place for many of Houston's civic leaders and historic figures. In Houston's Silent Garden, Suzanne Turner and Joanne Seale Wilson reveal the story of this beautifully wooded and landscaped preserve's development—a story that is also very much entwined with the history of Houston. In 1871, recovering from Reconstruction, a group of progressive citizens noticed that Houston needed a new cemetery at the edge of the central city. Embracing the picturesque aesthetic that had swept through the Eastern Seaboard, the founders of Glenwood selected land along Buffalo Bayou and developed Glenwood. Since then, the cemetery's monuments have memorialized the lives of many of the city's most interesting residents (Allen, Baker, Brown, Clayton, Cooley, Cullinan, Farish, Hermann, Hobby, House, Hughes, Jones, Law, Rice, Staub, Sterling, Weiss, and Wortham, among many others). The monuments also showcase the artistry and craftsmanship of some of the region's finest sculptors and artisans. Accompanied by the breathtaking photography of Paul Hester, this book chronicles the cemetery's origins from its inception in 1871 to the present day. Through the story of Glenwood, readers will appreciate some of the natural features that shaped Houston's evolution and will also begin to understand the forces of urbanization that positioned Houston to become the vital community it is today. Houston's Silent Garden is a must-read for those interested in Houston civic and regional history, architecture, and urban planning.

Progressive former governor James Stephen Hogg moved his business headquarters to Houston in 1905. For seven decades, his children Will, Ima, and Mike Hogg used their political ties, social position, and family fortune to improve the lives of fellow Houstonians. As civic activists, they espoused contested causes like city planning and mental health care. As volunteers, they inspired others to support social service, educational, and cultural programs. As philanthropic entrepreneurs, they built institutions that have long outlived them: the Houston Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, Memorial Park, and the Hogg Foundation. The Hoggs had a vision of Houston as a great city—a place that supports access to parklands, music, and art; nurtures knowledge of the "American heritage which unites us"; and provides social service and mental health care assistance. This vision links them to generations of American idealists who advanced a moral response to change. Based on extensive archival sources, The Hogg Family and Houston explains the impact of Hogg family philanthropy for the first time. This study explores how individual ideals and actions influence community development and nurture humanitarian values. It examines how philanthropists and volunteers mold Houston's traditions and mobilize allies to meet civic goals. It argues that Houston's generous citizens have long believed that innovative cultural achievement must balance aggressive economic expansion.

"Focuses on networks of people, information, conveyances, and other resources and technologies that moved slave-based products from suppliers to buyers and users." (page 3) The book examines the credit and financial systems that grew up around trade in slaves and products made by slaves.

"Back in 2005, the board of the directors of the Houston Police Officers' Union commissioned Mitchel Roth, Ph.D., and Tom Kennedy to research and write a book that chronicled the history of the Houston Police Department and the Houston Police Officers' Union."--Foreword.

A century after the first wave of Hispanic settlement in Houston, the city has come to be known as the "Hispanic mecca of Texas." Arnoldo De León's classic study of Hispanic Houston, now updated to cover recent developments and encompass a decade of additional scholarship, showcases the urban experience for Sunbelt Mexican Americans. De León focuses on the development of the barrios in Texas' largest city from the 1920s to the present. Following the generational model, he explores issues of acculturation and identity formation across political and social eras. This contribution to community studies, urban history, and ethnic studies was originally published in 1989 by the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston. With the Center's cooperation, it is now available again for a new generation of scholars.

La Brea Tar Pits once trapped prehistoric mammals. Today that killer has a chemical cousin in the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, Canada—immense deposits of natural asphalt destined for upgrading to synthetic crude oil. If the harvesting of this natural asphalt continues unabated, we might find ourselves stuck in a muck of a different kind. Humanity has used asphalt for thousands of years. This humble hydrocarbon may have glued the first arrowhead to the first shaft, but the changes wrought by this material are most dramatic since its emergence as pavement. Since the 1920s the automobile and blacktop have allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to experience the beauty of their continent from the Adirondacks to the Rockies and beyond, to Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway. Blacktop roads, runways, and parking lots constitute the central arteries of our environment, creating a distinct “political territory” and a “political economy of velocity.” In Asphalt: A History Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture. Although O’Reilly argues that asphalt creates our environment, he believes it also eventually threatens it. Looking at its role in economics, politics, and global warming, O’Reilly explores asphalt’s contribution to the history, and future, of America and the world.

An abolitionist and a champion of free love and women’s rights would seem decidedly out of place in nineteenth-century Texas, but such a man was Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886), American reformer, civil rights proponent, pioneer in sociology, advocate of reformed spelling, lawyer, and eccentric philosopher. Since his life mirrored and often anticipated the various reform movements spawned not only in Texas but in the United States in the nineteenth century, this first biography of him sharply reflects and elucidates his times. The extremely important role Andrews played in the abolition movement in this country has not heretofore been accorded him. After having witnessed slavery in Louisiana during the 1830s, Andrews came to Texas and began his career as an abolitionist with an audacious attempt to free the slaves there. His singular career, however, comprised many more activities than abolitionism, and most have long been forgotten by historians. He introduced Pitman shorthand into the United States as a means of teaching the uneducated to read; his role in the community of Modern Times, Long Island, was as important as that of Josiah Warren, the “first American anarchist,” although Andrews’s participation in this communal venture, along with the significance of Modern Times itself, has been underestimated. Other causes which Andrews supported included free love and the rights of women, dramatized by his journalistic debate with Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr., and by his endorsement of Victoria Woodhull as the first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States. These interests, together with his consequent involvement in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, provide insight into some of the more colorful aspects of nineteenth-century American reform movements. Andrews’s attacks upon whatever infringed on individual freedom brought him into diverse arenas—economic, sociological, and philosophical. The philosophical system he developed included among its tenets the sovereignty of the individual, a science of society, a universal language (his Alwato long preceded Esperanto), the unity of the sciences, and a “Pantarchal United States of the World.” His philosophy has never before been epitomized nor have its applications to later thought been considered. “I have made it the business of my life to study social laws,” Andrews wrote. “I see now a new age beginning to appear.” This biography of the dynamic reformer examines those social laws and that still-unembodied new age. It reanimates a heretofore neglected American reformer and casts new light upon previously unexplored bypaths of nineteenth-century American social history. The biography is fully documented, based in part upon a corpus of unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.