"[A] narrative with resonance well beyond seekers of Texas history. The Last Sheriff in Texas would be an amazing allegory for our times, were it fiction. Instead it suggests cultural trenches that we view as new that were dug decades ago." —Houston Chronicle Beeville, Texas, was the most American of small towns—the place that GIs had fantasized about while fighting through the ruins of Europe, a place of good schools, clean streets, and churches. Old West justice ruled, as evidenced by a 1947 shootout when outlaws surprised popular sheriff Vail Ennis at a gas station and shot him five times, point–blank, in the belly. Ennis managed to draw his gun and put three bullets in each assailant; he reloaded and shot them three times more. Time magazine’s full–page article on the shooting was seen by some as a referendum on law enforcement owing to the sheriff’s extreme violence, but supportive telegrams from all across America poured into Beeville’s tiny post office. Yet when a second violent incident threw Ennis into the crosshairs of public opinion once again, the uprising was orchestrated by an unlikely figure: his close friend and Beeville’s favorite son, Johnny Barnhart. Barnhart confronted Ennis in the election of 1952: a landmark standoff between old Texas, with its culture of cowboy bravery and violence, and urban Texas, with its lawyers, oil institutions, and a growing Mexican population. The town would never be the same again. The Last Sheriff in Texas is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, Anglo–Mexican relations, gun control, the influence of the media, urban–rural conflict, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process—all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In 1947, Vail Ennis was the sheriff of Beeville, Texas, and he killed seven men in under a month. His death would gray the memory of his own killings. #2 The American Café in Beeville, Texas, in 1947, was the last gathering of the old-style sheriffs of Texas. They were ribbed about their hunting skills, but they knew about guns and knew how they could do damage. #3 Vail Ennis, the sheriff of Beeville, Texas, was the last of the old-style sheriffs of Texas. He had killed seven men in under a month when he was stopped by Alfred Allee, a Ranger. #4 Vail Ennis, the sheriff of Beeville, Texas, was the last of the old-style sheriffs of Texas. He had killed seven men in under a month when he was stopped by Alfred Allee, a Ranger.

The Texas Sheriff takes a fresh, colorful, and insightful look at Texas law enforcement during the decades before 1960. In the first half of the twentieth century, rural Texas was a strange, often violent, and complicated place. Nineteenth-century lifestyles persisted, blood relationships made a difference, and racial apartheid was still rigidly enforced. Citizens expected their county sheriff to uphold local customs as well as state laws. He had to help constituents with their personal problems, which often had little or nothing to do with law enforcement. The rural sheriff served as his county’s “Mr. Fixit,” its resident “good old boy,” and the lord of an intricate rural society. Basing his interpretations on primary sources and extensive interviews, Thad Sitton explores the dual nature of Texas sheriffs, demonstrating their far-reaching power both to do good and to abuse the law.

One of the most colorful parts of American History is the time of train robberies and the daring outlaws who undertook them in the period covering from just after the Civil War to 1924. For decades, the railroads were the principal transporters of payrolls, gold and silver, bonds, and passengers who often carried large sums of money as well as valuable jewelry. For the creative outlaw, trains became an obvious target for robbery. Willis Newton has never enjoyed the recognition and fame of the better known train robbing outlaws such as Frank and Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, the Daltons, and the Doolins, but he was the most prolific and successful train robber in the history of North America. Newton stole more money from the railroads than all of the others put together. During his lifetime, Newton robbed six trains and an estimated eighty banks, pulled off the greatest train robbery ever, netting $3,000,000, yet remains virtually unknown. So unknown was he that, despite all of his success as a robber, he was rarely identified as a suspect. Following his greatest heist, Newton and his gang member, composed of his brothers, were arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to serve long terms at Leavenworth Prison. When they were granted early release for good behavior, they lost no time in returning to robbing banks. Willis Newton’s life and times as America’s greatest, and last, train robber has been gleaned and developed from extensive interviews he granted during the 1970s when he was in his eighties. In addition, newspaper reports of his numerous train and bank robberies have been obtained and researched for precise details of robberies and pursuit.

History of the first railroad built across Indian Territory (Oklahoma).

Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Prize A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Times A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics. The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them. In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie” of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing. How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?” What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy? Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding. A must-read for fans of Michelle Alexander, Gilbert King, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kathleen Belew.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

So small it had only one bank, so quiet no citizens carried guns. Hard-working, peaceful Northfield, Minnesota, was an orderly yet busy mill-town in the heart of prosperous farm country. On a serene autumn Tuesday in 1876, local shopkeepers, farmers, and citizenry went about their normal routines, little realizing that the infamous and deadly James-Younger gang had designs on tiny Northfield. The experienced robbers planned to target the single bank, which held the hard-earned money of the townsfolk. Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers had never experienced defeat. During a wild gun battle that raged between the outlaws and the bankmen up and down the town’s main street, two unarmed townsfolk were murdered. Northfield’s angered populace fought back. The townspeople killed two members of the James-Younger gang and wounded several more. The remaining bandits fled but were pursued across southwestern Minnesota by a posse that gradually grew to more than a thousand men. In Last Hurrah of the James-Younger Gang, Robert Barr Smith debunks the James-Younger "Robin Hood" image and shows that the real heroes of the Northfield raid were the ordinary people--the bankers who protected their depositors at their own risk, the townspeople who pitched in to chase the gang from town, and the posse members who pursued and triumphed over the retreating remnants of the gang.