Bøger udgivet af Texas Christian University Press,U.S.

This story of the Texas frontier dramatizes the capture by a Comanche band of a ten-year-old white girl and her five-year-old sister from the upper reaches of the Brazos River a decade before the Civil War.

In 1899, as prairie fires rage through the Texas Panhandle, twelve-year-old Shyanne struggles with both her guilt over the death of her twin sister Shenandoah in a blizzard the previous winter and her crush on the most popular boy in class.

Walking backward in the wind was often a child's game. But in West Texas during the Great Depression, whether you were child or grownup, it was a method of moving ahead by backing through the legendary windstorms which swept the landscape, the same winds that covered beds, furniture and even food with a thick layer of dust. Helen Mangum Field's account opens and closes with the winds - one a nameless windstorm, the other the fabled Black Duster. But Walking Backward in the Wind is about more than the winds - they are only bookends, a blustery literary device. What occurs between the winds - the rhythms of farm families and communities in the 1920s - is the heart of this narrative. Cleaning the stove, daily dusting or shoveling dirt, planting, killing hogs, box suppers, dipping snuff, candling eggs, wringing chickens' necks and drawing names at Christmas are all richly detailed without sentimentality. In spite of gusts which grabbed and tore at the fabric of life, Helen Mangum Fields proves how successful walking backward in the wind was.

In 1848 the York and Gilmore families stopped their covered wagons north of the Trinity River near present-day Fort Worth. A century and a half later, the settlement they founded is North Fort Worth, with a colorful history centered around livestock, tourism, and family life. After the Civil War, life often revolved around massive cattle drives passing through North Fort Worth. Later, stockyards were built and the meat packing industry boomed, attracting thousands of people from around the world - Austria, Greece, Russia, Mexico, and Poland. North Fort Worth is now incorporated within the city of Fort Worth and continues to contribute a unique history and atmosphere essential to one of Texas' most diverse and fascinating cities.

Letters to OmaA Young German Girl's Account of Her First Year in Texas, 1847By Marj GurasichWhen fifteen-year-old Christina Eudora Von Scholl learns that her family will leave their German homeland to seek freedom in Texas, her greatest sorrow is leaving behind her beloved grandmother. And so, in a series of letters, she takes "Oma" on this great adventure with her family . . . and takes us as readers.Sometimes the letters are dark with discouragement, for the Von Scholls find, as did many German-Texas families, that the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants, known as the Adelsverein, was unable to fulfill its promises of land, housing, horses, and farm implements. But they are Germans, determined and willing to work hard.More often these letters-and the text woven in between them-are bright with adventure, for Tina finds Texas an exciting, if puzzling, place. There are new customs to learn, new foods to eat, even while the family preserves its traditional German ways. Tina's adventures include a run-in with a mountain lion, an exciting trip across Texas with her father to Sisterdale, and a frightening encounter with Lipan Indians. Her lessons in being an American are helped by Jeff, a young man who becomes part of the family when he undertakes to teach them to farm in Texas. Tina, in return, teaches Jeff to read and learns a lesson in love that is without nationality.Letters to Oma is a charming, informative novel that sweeps the reader back to a very particular time and place. And Tina Von Scholl is irresistible as correspondent and as heroine.Raised in Idaho and Indiana, Marj Gurasich has been a resident of the Houston area for over thirty years. She is the author of several nonfiction studies and the juvenile novel, Red Wagons and White Canvas. The inspiration for Letters to Oma was twofold: While researching the history of Industry, Texas, for an article on the 150th anniversary of town founder Friedrich Ernst's arrival in Texas, she came across a magazine photograph of an antique German cuckoo clock. She had long been fascinated by the story of the German settlers, their hardships and sacrifices, and their immense contributions to the patchwork-quilt culture that is Texas. The clock inspired her to create a story about those early settlers, the story of Christina and her family . . . and her clock.

First published in 1970, "Another Part of the House" is a simple, direct, intimate story of family life in a small Texas town during the Depression. Told by 10-year-old Larry Morrison, it reflects Larry's uncertainty as he sees the security of his family--mother, father, and 15 year-old brother, Tad--threatened by immediate forces such as his father's ne'er-do-well brother, Uncle Calvin, and by larger, more serious adversaries--the Depression, the drought, the dust and, most incomprehensible of all, death. How the family deals with them while preserving its own strength and unity is the story.

Probably no American journalist, man or woman, has had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before President Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. Born on the windswept plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged from the age of five by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail, "to travel, to get the benefit" of knowing other peoples. She began her travels at the age of twenty, going first to Mexico and then touring the British Isles by bicycle. Halsell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and lived in London, Tokyo, Berlin and Seoul. In Hong Kong, where she lived on a fishing junk with a Chinese family of nineteen, she wrote a column for the Tiger Standard; in Tokyo, where she slept on tatami mats, ate raw fish and took scalding ofuro baths, she was a columnist for the Japan Times. Moving to South America, she traveled on a tug for 2000 miles down the Amazon and crossed the Andes by jeep. In Lima, she became a columnist for the Spanish-language daily, La Prensa. Halsell has been the Big Buddha, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids and Machu Picchu, has interviewed presidents, movie stars, kings and prime ministers. Her newspaper dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post and the Christian Science Monitor have datelined war zones in Korean, Vietnam and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia and Albania.

The four essays that make up this volume are based upon and expand the lectures Ricoeur delivered at Texas Christian University, 27-30 November 1973, as their Centennial Lectures. They may be read as separate essays, but they may also be read as step by step approximations of a solution to a single problem.