On the eve of its centennial, Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson present almost 100 years of history and never-before-seen photographs that track the development of the Texas Highway Department. An agency originally created “to get the farmer out of the mud,” it has gone on to build the vast network of roads that now connects every corner of the state. When the Texas Highway Department (now called the Texas Department of Transportation or TxDOT) was created in 1917, there were only about 200,000 cars in Texas traveling on fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Today, after 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, the state boasts over 80,000 miles of paved, state-maintained roads that accommodate more than 25 million vehicles. Sure to interest history enthusiasts and casual readers alike, decades of progress and turmoil, development and disaster, and politics and corruption come together once more in these pages, which tell the remarkable story of an infrastructure 100 years in the making.

“Jay B. Sauceda is creating a new kind of literature for the state, a visual literature that is as significant and powerful as John Graves’s Goodbye to a River, Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, Edna Ferber’s Giant, or T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star. His compositions accomplish what all great work does—offering a new way of seeing things so familiar that we have stopped seeing them.” —Rick Bass in Texas Monthly On the ground, Texas is a vast patchwork of natural and human landscapes—wide open spaces contrasting with sprawling cities; the watery worlds of rivers, lakes, and coastlines giving way to the arid vistas of plains and deserts. From the air, though, Texas takes on a wholeness that unites the landscapes that people manufacture with the land that nature still sculpts. This is the Texas that Jay B. Sauceda portrays in A Mile above Texas, a book of stunning aerial photographs that document the entire perimeter of the state. Sauceda flew 3,822 miles, over five days in 2015, in a single-engine Cessna. He shot more than 44,000 photos from the plane, via handheld cameras and GoPros attached to the wings. This book presents the very best of those photographs in sections that cover each leg of the trip: Victoria to Marshall, Marshall to Dalhart, Dalhart to El Paso, El Paso to Marfa, and Marfa to Mustang Beach. With fresh views of Texas’s beaches and rivers, woodlands and deserts, cities and farms, A Mile above Texas offers an encompassing view of the state that perhaps only flyers and migratory birds have enjoyed before now.

"Miles of Tiles" is a mathematics lesson for middle school classes requiring students to calculate the number and cost of tiles needed to cover the floor of the classroom. This lesson includes Internet activities. "Miles of Tiles" is presented as a service of the Link-to-Learn Professional Development Project of Pennsylvania, a state-sponsored educational technology initiative.

All the information since the earliest Billboard charts were originally compiled in 1942 is gathered into this one essential reference on country music that has been updated and expanded to capture today's top recording artists and their biggest songs. Original.

While Maj. Samuel Peter Heintzelman, one of the most cultured, dedicated, and respected officers in the antebellum frontier army, was at Camp Verde on September 28, 1859, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina sent shock waves throughout Texas by brazenly leading some seventy-five angry raiders into the streets of Brownsville and initiated a war that would reverberate north to Austin and beyond to the halls of Washington and Mexico City. Heintzelman's journal provides a detailed and vivid account of the battles at El Ebonal and Rio Grande City. Heintzelman's impressions of his senior commander, Col. Robert E. Lee, are also noteworthy.

Internationally acclaimed interior design sensation Miles Redd is known for his quirky brand of cozy glamour. His unique aesthetic vision is characterized by playful mélanges of high and low, invigorated with whimsical splashes of color and modern gestures. Drawing on inspirations ranging from Richard Avedon fashion photographs to Rene Gruau illustrations, Redd has crafted interiors for a wide array of venues. His Trademark approach to design has brought to life rooms infused with boldness, fantasy, and sophistication. This lavishly illustrated volume will be an inspiration to anyone interested in spirited, eclectic design.

From a debut voice comes a quirky and completely fresh story of young love and loss that explores gender nonconformity and the spectrum of sexual preference in an authentic way.

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

Miles evokes Indian, Mexican and Anglo traditions that converge in this area in this collection of tales. They cover supernatural phenomena such as the Marfa lights and water witching, murders, feuds, and lost treasures.

A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.