Goodnight to the many points of interest in Houston.

Houston, Texas, long thought of as a traditionally blue-collar black/white southern city, has transformed into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metro areas in the nation, surpassing even New York by some measures. With a diversifying economy and large numbers of both highly-skilled technical jobs in engineering and medicine and low-skilled minimum-wage jobs in construction, restaurant work, and personal services, Houston has become a magnet for the new divergent streams of immigration that are transforming America in the 21st century. And thanks to an annual systematic survey conducted over the past thirty-eight years, the ongoing changes in attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences have been measured and studied, creating a compelling data-driven map of the challenges and opportunities that are facing Houston and the rest of the country. In Prophetic City, we'll meet some of the new Americans, including a family who moved to Houston from Mexico in the early 1980s and is still trying to find work that pays more than poverty wages. There's a young man born to highly-educated Indian parents in an affluent Houston suburb who grows up to become a doctor in the world's largest medical complex, as well as a white man who struggles with being prematurely pushed out of the workforce when his company downsizes. This timely and groundbreaking book tracks the progress of an American city like never before. Houston is at the center of the rapid changes that have redefined the nature of American society itself in the new century. Houston is where, for better or worse, we can see the American future emerging.

In this book sociologist Robert D. Bullard explores the major social, economic, and political factors that helped make Houston the "golden buckle" of the Sunbelt. He then chronicles the rise of Houston's black neighborhoods. Using case studies conducted in Houston's Third Ward, the city's most diverse black neighborhood, he discusses housing patterns, discrimination, law enforcement, and leadership, relating these to the larger issues of institutional racism, poverty, and politics. Book jacket.

Provides a brief overview of the life and accomplishments of Texas politician Sam Houston.

Offers advice to gardeners on how to cope with the climateand soil of the Texas Gulf Coast region, reviewing the basics of how plants grow, soil preparation, planting and maintenance, and pest control; and featuring descriptions of major landscape plants, seasonal flowers, tropicals, vegetables, and table crops.

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

On July 20, 1969, humanity paused with attention locked to television and radio broadcasts as the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission dramatically touched down on the dusty face of the moon. The first word from the lunar surface: Houston. Houston, Space City USA is a visual celebration of the city’s historic ties to the US human space program. When President Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” he did so from the campus of Rice University. More than half a century later, Houston continues to serve as the nerve center of the American human space program. Author and photographer Ray Viator, a longtime Houstonian, has lovingly captured the spirit of a city’s devotion to space exploration from then to now. Using striking photographs of the full moon as a visual motif of Houston’s connection to spaceflight, Viator also weaves together historic images to show how former cow pastures transformed into mission control. Some connections are obvious—the Houston Astros or the Houston Rockets. Others are hidden in plain sight, like the arm patches on the uniform of every Houston police officer that read, “Space City U.S.A.” Viator’s lens captures this and more. Houston, Space City USA not only marks the important milestone of the first lunar landing, but it also helps readers discover and rediscover a city’s constellation of connections to one of humankind’s greatest achievements. The author's proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit Houston Public Media.

Praise for Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston: "I find Cite to be thorough, imaginative, always stimulating, and responsive to the diversity of the Houston community. I hope to see it continue—I hope to see it flourish." —Larry McMurtry "Cite is one of the liveliest and most interesting journals on architecture and urbanism that is being produced today." —Robert Bruegmann, Professor and Chair, Art History Department and School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago "Cite has become an important national publication, for it situates local and regional culture within the context of national and global issues. Thus it provides an antidote to provincialism, on the one hand, and to excessively abstract globalism on the other. Put differently, Cite proves that local concerns need not be parochial, while national or global trends have multiple variations." —Gwendolyn Wright, Professor, Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University "In my judgment, this magazine is competitive with any in the United States that focuses on architecture and the built environment." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences, Columbia University "I know of few other publications in America that have so consistently, and at such a perceptive and sophisticated level, promoted high quality design as a mission of education and improvement.... I am devoted to it and read every issue with great interest, though I live a half continent away." —Laurie D. Olin, FASLA, Hon. AIA, FAAR, Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania Built around characteristic features of modern life such as rapid change, built-in obsolescence, indeterminacy, media orientation, a culture of style, and instant gratification, Houston is an ephemeral city, hard to pin down and understand. Its lack of zoning (Houston is the only major city in America without it) and a burgeoning population that doubles every generation have created a new urban paradigm, where displacements of traditional patterns of stability and urban ritual are now the norm. Since 1982, Cite: The Architectural and Design Review of Houston has explored the nature of Houston's evolution as an urban place by publishing commissioned articles by nationally known writers and architectural historians and high quality photography. This volume brings together twenty-five exceptional articles from Cite's first twenty years, along with 224 black-and-white photographs, maps, and plans. The book is divided into three sections: "Idea of the City," edited by Bruce C. Webb, "Places of the City," edited by Barrie Scardino, and "Buildings of the City," edited by William F. Stern. The sections are introduced with new essays written by the editors to provide cohesion for the anthology and commentary on where Houston might be going in the twenty-first century. Most articles are followed by a brief update and bibliography of related articles published in Cite. The editors chose these articles to explore the developmental history and architecture of a flat, sprawling, free-spirited city that is impossible to capture through any one episode or explain through any one place. With a diversity of voices and a selection that includes both narrow and broad topics, the volume constitutes a collage that captures the essence of a remarkable place—inchoate, patchwork, full of youthful vigor, favorable to private enterprise, and one of the world's most fascinating cities.

Revealing the secret history of punctuation, this tour of two thousand years of the written word, from ancient Greece to the Internet, explores the parallel histories of language and typography throughout the world and across time.

"Everybody who has ever read a book will benefit from the way Keith Houston explores the most powerful object of our time. And everybody who has read it will agree that reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated."— Erik Spiekermann, typographer We may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages—of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations, and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today. Sure to delight book lovers of all stripes with its lush, full-color illustrations, The Book gives us the momentous and surprising history behind humanity’s most important—and universal—information technology.