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 They are provided here for reference and support of the historical content they contain.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 8 of 11

Sam Houston

In the decades preceding the Civil War, few figures in the United States were as influential or as controversial as Sam Houston. In Sam Houston, James L. Haley explores Houston’s momentous career and the complex man behind it. Haley’s fifteen years of research and writing have produced possibly the most complete, most personal, and most readable Sam Houston biography ever written. Drawn from personal papers never before available as well as the papers of others in Houston’s circle, this biography will delight anyone intrigued by Sam Houston, Texas history, Civil War history, or America’s tradition of rugged individualism.

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By James L. Haley

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great Depression

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.

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By Walter L. Buenger, Ph.D.

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot

For a few brief months during the presidential campaign of 1960, Mexican Americans caught a glimpse of their own Camelot in the promise of John F. Kennedy. Grassroots "Viva Kennedy Clubs" sprang up not only in the southwestern United States but also across California and the upper Midwest to help elect the young Catholic standard bearer. The leaders of the Viva Kennedy Clubs were confident and hopeful that their participation in American democracy would mark the beginning of the end of discrimination, violence, and poverty in the barrio.

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By Ignacio M. García

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920

Why in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did middle- and upper-class southern women-black and white-advance from the private worlds of home and family into public life, eventually transforming the cultural and political landscape of their community? Using Galveston as a case study, Elizabeth Hayes Turner asks who where the women who became activists and eventually led to progressive reforms and the women sufferage movement. Turner discovers that a majority of them came from particular congregations, but class status had as much to do with reofrm as did religious motivation.

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By Elizabeth Hayes Turner

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute and Sectional Crisis

Writing on the Texas-New Mexico boundary issue, the author of this book provides an analysis of the dispute, the compromise, and the overall implications for the Civil War. He examines the crisis through a close reading of Texan and New Mexican documents, government papers and other data.

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By Mark J. Stegmaier

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Changing Tides: Twilight & Dawn in the Spanish Sea, 1763-1803

Well-organized and clearly written, this volume, the third part of a history of the Gulf of Mexico in the Spanish colonial era, rests on a thorough integration of secondary publications with the author's archival research. The first part of series is Spanish Sea: Gulf of Mexico in North American discovery (1985); second part is The French thorn: rival explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682-1762 (1991)

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By Robert S. Weddle

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862

In the early morning hours of October 1, 1862, state militia arrested more than two hundred alleged Unionists from five North Texas counties and brought them to Gainesville, the seat of Cooke County. In the ensuing days, at least forty-four of the prisoners were hanged, and several other men were lynched in neighboring communities. This event proved to be the grisly climax of a heritage of violence and vigilantism in North Texas that began before the Civil War and lasted long afterward.

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By Richard B. McCaslin

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the Limits of Southern Discontent

In this fascinating story of two nineteenth-century southern political mavericks, Gregg Cantrell details their fate as dissenters, telling a human story at once heroic and shameful, hopeful and tragic. The two mavericks were the slaveholding congressman and planter Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina and his illegitimate mulatto son, John B. Rayner of Texas.

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By Gregg Cantrell, Ph.D.

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Oleander Odyssey: The Kempners of Galveston, Texas, 1854-1980

The complete archives of the Kempner family papers housed at the Rosenberg Library in Galveston provided the primary source material for this work, and Harold Hyman's further research provides a backdrop of social, political, and religious factors affecting four generations of Kempners in Galveston. The result is a story about large, diverse family businesses, Progressive urban reform and community development, the acculturation of American and Southern Jews, and the dynamics of life, politics, and the economy in Southeast Texas.

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By Harold M. Hyman

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865

Because Texas emerged from the western frontier relatively late in the formation of the antebellum nation, it is frequently and incorrectly perceived as fundamentally western in its political and social orientation. In fact, most of the settlers of this area were emigrants from the South, and many of these people brought with them their slaves and all aspects of slavery as it had matured in their native states.

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By Randolph B. Campbell, Ph.D.

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Livestock Legacy: The Fort Worth Stockyards, 1887-1987

A hundred years ago a simple business arrangement changed the course of Fort Worth's economy for years to come and its character perhaps forever. On July 26, 1887, the Union Stock Yards Company received a charter to do business in an area just north of town. The legacy of that charter: Cowtown.

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By J'Nell L. Pate

Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.