The Centennial series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University ;

An innovative contribution to the growing body of research about urban African-American culture in the South, Black Dixie is the first anthology to track the black experience in a single southern city across the entire slavery/post-slavery continuum. It combines the best previously published scholarship about black Houston and little-known contemporary eye-witness accounts of the city with fresh, unpublished essays by historians and social scientists. Divided into four. Sections, the book covers a broad range of both time and subjects. The first section analyzes the development of scholarly consciousness and interest in the history of black Houston; slavery in nineteenth-century Houston is covered in the second section; economic and social development in Houston in the era of segregation are looked at in the third section; and segregation, violence, and civil rights in twentieth-century Houston are dealt with in the final section. Collectively, the contents of Black Dixie utilize the full range of primary sources available to scholars studying the black South. These include such traditional material as newspapers and diaries as well as newer techniques involving quantification and statistical analysis. The editors' remarks relate the individual essays to one another as well as placing them within the context of scholarly literature on the subject. Hence Black Dixie will serve both as a resource. And as a model for the study of black urban culture in Texas and throughout the South.

In 1902 a new federal district court was established to serve a broad segment of the Texas Gulf Coast region, including Houston. In the use of its discretion to choose between "private" and "public" law, this court for many years served the interests of the region's economic and political elite and helped stabilize a fast-changing economy that was undergoing wild swings of boom and bust. After 1945, however, the court reluctantly began to address growing demands for. Public law enforcement of national policies, including civil rights, and by 1960, public law issues had come to dominate the court's dockets. In this groundbreaking study of a representative lower federal court, Charles L. Zelden provides insight into the functioning of district courts and their impact on the larger legal, economic, and political systems. Combining the perspectives of legal history with those of economic, business, urban, political, and social history. And drawing on largely untapped manuscript court records, he offers a unique view of the ways in which the federal courts have shaped the nation's public and private life. The well-crafted narrative looks at the full range of the court's decisions, clearly explaining complex legal issues. It sketches in as well the personalities and political positions of the judges. Zelden demonstrates that a judge's personal and class background largely determined his judicial. Philosophy and set his agenda on the bench. Zelden's work contributes an important dimension to the growing literature on the economic, social, and urban history of Texas and of America in the first half of this century. It elucidates the judicial role in consolidating a cultural ethos of economic growth, self-reliant individualism, and freedom from governmental restraint.

John was a medical Doctor, geoglist, and botanist who traveled from New Orleans to Texas 1839,surveying the Texas Hill country for a group of for businessmen searching for the lost San Saba Silver mine.