TSHA Community

Great publications from our members and award recipients.

These books were authored by members of TSHA or received one of TSHA’s book awards. They are provided here for reference and support of the historical content they contain.

List of Publications (126 total) Page 5 of 11

Texas Through Women's Eyes: The Twentieth Century Experience

Texas women broke barriers throughout the twentieth century, winning the right to vote, expanding their access to higher education, entering new professions, participating fully in civic and political life, and planning their families. Yet these major achievements have hardly been recognized in histories of twentieth-century Texas. By contrast, Texas Through Women's Eyes offers a fascinating overview of women's experiences and achievements in the twentieth century, with an inclusive focus on rural women, working-class women, and women of color.

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By Harold L. Smith and Judith N. McArthur

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Emily Austin of Texas 1795-1851

The Austin family left an indelible mark on Texas and the expanding American nation. In this insightful biography, Light Townsend Cummins turns the historical spotlight on Emily Austin, the daughter who followed the trails of the western frontier to Texas, where she saw the burgeoning young colony erupt in revolution, establish a proud republic, and usher in the period of antebellum statehood. Emily's journey was one of remarkable personal change as the rigors of frontier life shaped her into a uniquely self-reliant southern woman, one who fulfilled the role of the plantation mistress while taking a distinct hand in ambitious public ventures. Despite her ties to influential family members, including her brother Stephen F. Austin, Emily's determined spirit allowed her to live on her own terms. In all of her notable activities, Emily principally remained a devoted daughter, sister, wife, and mother who proudly clung to her Austin roots. Utilizing her family's written correspondence, Cummins provides insight into Emily's multifaceted personality and the relationships that sustained her through times of tribulation and triumph. "Emily was very much her own woman, with strong, well-articulated personal feelings centered on a steely personality. Her rock-solid resolve for action enabled her to survive almost six decades of frontier hardship . . . Above all else, Emily Austin was the touchstone at the center of an extended family that provided a common point of reference for four generations . . . " Light Cummins, from Emily Austin

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By Light Townsend Cummins

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Black Women in Texas History

Though often consigned to the footnotes of history, African American women are a significant part of the rich, multiethnic heritage of Texas and the United States. Until now, though, their story has frequently been fragmented and underappreciated. Black Women in Texas History draws together a multi-author narrative of the experiences and impact of black American women from the time of slavery until the recent past. Each chapter, written by an expert on the era, provides a readable survey and overview of the lives and roles of black Texas women during that period. Each provides careful documentation, which, along with the thorough bibliography compiled by the volume editors, will provide a starting point for others wanting to build on this important topic. The authors address significant questions about population demographics, employment patterns, family and social dimensions, legal and political rights, and individual accomplishments. They look not only at how African American women have been shaped by the larger culture but also at how these women have, in turn, affected the culture and history of Texas. This work situates African American women within the context of their times and offers a due appreciation and analysis of their lives and accomplishments. Black Women in Texas History is an important addition to history and sociology curriculums as well as black studies and women’s studies programs. It will provide for interested students, scholars, and general readers a comprehensive survey of the crucial role these women played in shaping the history of the Lone Star State.

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By Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands

Revising the standard narrative of European-Indian relations in America, Juliana Barr reconstructs a world in which Indians were the dominant power and Europeans were the ones forced to accommodate, resist, and persevere. She demonstrates that between the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches, Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial control.

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By Juliana Barr

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Texas Women on the Cattle Trails

Texas Women on the Cattle Trails tells the stories of sixteen women who drove cattle up the trail from Texas during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some were young; some were old (over thirty). Some took to the trails by choice; others, out of necessity. Some went along to look at the stars; others, to work the cattle. Some made money and built ranching empires, but others went broke and lived hard, even desperate lives.

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By Sara R. Massey

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist

From the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote.

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By Darlene H. Unrue

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Indomitable Sarah: The Life of Judge Sarah T. Hughes

Judge Sarah T. Hughes is perhaps best remembered as the woman who swore in Lyndon Johnson as president aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, after President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. But long before then, she had been making headlines as the foremost woman Democrat in Texas. In 1935, over the protests of a local senator who said she should be home washing dishes, Sarah T. Hughes was appointed the first woman district judge in Texas. She was nominated for vice president of the United States at the 1952 Democratic National Convention, and in 1961 she was nominated by President John F. Kennedy as a federal district judge. A feminist who devoted her life to liberal causes, she presided over the three-judge panel and wrote the opinion that overturned Texas’s abortion laws in 1970 in Roe v. Wade, a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision that has rocked American society and politics to this day.

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By Darwin Payne

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragist's Life in Politics

The principal orchestrator of the passage of women's suffrage in Texas, a founder and national officer of the League of Women Voters, the first woman to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas, and a candidate for that state's governor, Minnie Fisher Cunningham was one of the first American women to pursue a career in party politics. Cunningham's professional life spanned a half century, thus illuminating our understanding of women in public life between the Progressive Era and the 1960s feminist movement.

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By Harold L. Smith and Judith N. McArthur

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Maria von Blucher's Corpus Christi: Letters from the South Texas Frontier, 1849-1879

“This is a fascinating book. Maria von Blucher’s letters are highly informative reading for anyone who is interested in learning about the daily life of a woman and her family in nineteenth-century Texas, particularly from a German perspective. Maria von Blucher’s correspondence can also be viewed as one of the earliest examples of writing produced by a woman who wrote in the German language in Texas. Maria von Blucher’s edited correspondence is a book well worth reading and rereading, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the story of the German experience in Texas.”--German-Texan Heritage Society

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By Bruce S. Cheeseman

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Her Act and Deed: Women's Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837-1873

Deeds, wills, divorce decrees, and other evidence of the public lives of nineteenth-century women belie the long-held beliefs of their public invisibility. Angela Boswell's Her Act and Deed: Women's Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837–1873 follows the threads of Southern women's lives as they weave through the public records of one Texas county during the middle of the nineteenth century. Her unique approach to exploring women's roles in a South that spanned the frontier, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras illuminates the truths of the feminine world of those periods, and her analysis of this set of complete public records for those years challenges the theory of men's and women's separate spheres of influence, as advanced by many scholars.

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By Angela Boswell

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923-1999

This first complete record of the women of the Texas Legislature places such well-known figures as Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sissy Farenthold, Barbara Jordan, Irma Rangel, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Susan Combs, and Judith Zaffirini in the context of their times and among the women and men with whom they served. Drawing on years of primary research and interviews, Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten offer concise biographies and profiles of all eighty-six women who have served or currently hold office in the Texas Legislature.

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By Nancy Baker Jones, Ph.D. and Ruthe Winegarten

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women.

Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940

Rural women comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960. On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women's labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities: keeping house, sewing clothing, cultivating and cooking food, and bearing and raising children. But despite their contributions to the southern agricultural economy, rural women's stories have remained largely untold.

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By Rebecca Sharpless

Recipient of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women. Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

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List of Publications (126 total) Page 5 of 11

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