Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her? Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note of seemingly everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

Every area of the world can be mapped out for adventure, and brilliant babies love the sophistication of traveling by train.

Almost a century and a half went into the making of My Eighty Years in Texas. It began as a diary, kept by fifteen-year-old William Physick Zuber after he joined Sam Houston’s Texas army in 1836, hoping he could emulate the heroism of American Revolutionary patriots. Although his hopes were never realized, Zuber recorded the privations, victories, and defeats of armies on the move during the Texas Revolution, the Indian campaigns, and, as he styled it, the Confederate War. In 1910, at the age of ninety, Zuber began the enormous task of transcribing his diaries and his memories for publication. After his death in 1913, the handwritten manuscript, Eighty Years in Texas: Reminiscences of a Texas Veteran from 1830 to 1910, was placed in the Texas State Archives, where it was used as a reference source by students and scholars of Texas history. Over a half century after Zuber’s death, Janis Boyle Mayfield finally brought his publication plans to fruition. Zuber details his early zest for learning and his laborious methods of self-education. He tells of the trials of organizing and teaching schools in the sparsely populated plains. He recalls the day-by-day happenings of a private soldier in the Texas army of 1836, the Texas Militia, and the Confederate army—including the mishaps of army life and the encounters with enemies from San Jacinto to Cape Girardeau. After the Civil War, his interest turns to the politics of Reconstruction, the veterans’ pension, and the founding of the Texas Veterans Association. This is the story of and by an outspoken Texian, complete with his attitudes, principles, and moralizings, and the nineteenth-century style and flavor of his writing. Included as an appendix is “An Escape from the Alamo,” the account of Moses Rose for which Zuber, who was a prolific writer, was best known. A historiography of the Rose story, a bibliography of Zuber’s published and unpublished writings, annotation, and an introduction are provided by Llerena Friend.

On the morning of January 1, 2000, Mark T. Adams started counting birds. His goal was to find the largest possible number of species in one year in Texas, an undertaking known in birding parlance as a Big Year. By the evening of December 31, he had tied the record of 489 species seen or heard within the state’s borders in a single calendar year. Traveling 30,000 miles across Texas by car and 18,000 miles by plane, Adams alone saw 92 percent of all bird species reported in the state in 2000. In Chasing Birds across Texas, Adams invites birders and others with a broad interest in the outdoors to join him in exploring Texas’ varied habitats on his quest for birds—from the upper coast to the lower coast; into the Hill Country, the Panhandle, and the Chihuahuan Desert; and up the Davis, Chisos, and Guadalupe Mountains. As he happily celebrates the bounty of the Valley’s spring migration or desperately searches for a Panhandle rarity, we watch him grow as a naturalist, exult in the Texas landscape, and benefit from the company of some of the world’s best birders. Informative, inspiring, and great fun, Chasing Birds across Texas conveys as perhaps no other bird book can the humor, obsession, dedication, and adventure that are all part of the sport of birding.

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

In 1914, Jake O'Farrell is the last single man in Groom, Texas, and when a malfunctioning train forces Anne Denning and her sisters to stay in Groom until it can be fixed, Jake's mother tries to play matchmaker and chaos ensues.

Based on a Navy SEAL's inspiring graduation speech, this #1 New York Times bestseller of powerful life lessons "should be read by every leader in America" (Wall Street Journal). If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. On May 17, 2014, Admiral William H. McRaven addressed the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin on their Commencement day. Taking inspiration from the university's slogan, "What starts here changes the world," he shared the ten principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges not only in his training and long Naval career, but also throughout his life; and he explained how anyone can use these basic lessons to change themselves-and the world-for the better. Admiral McRaven's original speech went viral with over 10 million views. Building on the core tenets laid out in his speech, McRaven now recounts tales from his own life and from those of people he encountered during his military service who dealt with hardship and made tough decisions with determination, compassion, honor, and courage. Told with great humility and optimism, this timeless book provides simple wisdom, practical advice, and words of encouragement that will inspire readers to achieve more, even in life's darkest moments. "Powerful." --USA Today "Full of captivating personal anecdotes from inside the national security vault." --Washington Post "Superb, smart, and succinct." --Forbes

Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State engagingly tells the story of the Lone Star State, from the arrival of humans in the Panhandle more than 10,000 years ago to the opening of the twenty-first century. Focusing on the state's successive waves of immigrants, the book offers an inclusive view of the vast array of Texans who, often in conflict with each other and always in a struggle with the land, created a history and an idea of Texas. An Instructor's Resource Manual and a set of approximately 400 PowerPoint slides to accompany Gone to Texas, Third Edition, are now available to adopters. Please contact your local Oxford University Press representative for details.

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton. Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction. And nobody was ever caught. Greenwood just leaned forward into next year's work, and the year after that's, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Now Stephen's going back. His first time since high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can't go back. The ones who never got to leave. Part mystery, part memoir, Growing Up Dead in Texas is packed with more secrets than your average graveyard. Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel is a story about farming. A story about Texas. A story about finally standing up from the dead and walking away.