In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Texas—a hotly contested land where states wielded little to no real power—local alliances and controversies, face-to-face relationships, and kin ties structured personal dynamics and cross-communal concerns alike. Country of the Cursed and the Driven brings readers into this world through a sweeping analysis of Hispanic, Comanche, and Anglo-American slaving regimes, illuminating how slaving violence, in its capacity to bolster and shatter families and entire communities, became both the foundation and the scourge, the panacea and the curse, of life in the borderlands. As scholars have begun to assert more forcefully over the past two decades, slavery was much more diverse and widespread in North America than previously recognized, engulfing the lives of Native, European, and African descended people across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. Paul Barba details the rise of Texas’s slaving regimes, spotlighting the ubiquitous, if uneven and evolving, influences of colonialism and anti-Blackness. By weaving together and reframing traditionally disparate historical narratives, Country of the Cursed and the Driven challenges the common assumption that slavery was insignificant to the history of Texas prior to Anglo American colonization, arguing instead that the slavery imported by Stephen F. Austin and his colonial followers in the 1820s found a comfortable home in the slavery-stained borderlands, where for decades Spanish colonists and their Comanche neighbors had already unleashed waves of slaving devastation.

A sweeping, comparative analysis of the slaving regimes of Hispanic, Comanche, and Anglo American communities in the Texas borderlands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This devotional paraphrase brings the thoughts expressed in the Bible into clear focus.The result is that you find not only more understanding in reading the Bible, but more joy. Perfect for devotional reading, this edition features an easier-to-use format.

Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell—the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten—an omission that John Taliaferro’s commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn in 1849 and grew up on the estate of ornithologist John James Audubon. Upon graduation from Yale, he dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains with eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh—an expedition that fanned his romantic notion of wilderness and taught him a graphic lesson in evolution and extinction. Soon he joined George A. Custer in the Black Hills, helped to map Yellowstone, and scaled the peaks and glaciers that, through his labors, would become Glacier National Park. Along the way, he became one of America’s most respected ethnologists; seasons spent among the Plains Indians produced numerous articles and books, including his tour de force, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. More than a chronicler of natural history and indigenous culture, Grinnell became their tenacious advocate. He turned the sportsmen’s journal Forest and Stream into a bully pulpit for wildlife protection, forest reserves, and national parks. In 1886, his distress over the loss of bird species prompted him to found the first Audubon Society. Next, he and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote “fair chase” of big game. His influence among the rich and the patrician provided leverage for the first federal legislation to protect migratory birds—a precedent that ultimately paved the way for the Endangered Species Act. And in an era when too many white Americans regarded Native Americans as backwards, Grinnell’s cries for reform carried from the reservation, through the halls of Congress, all the way to the White House. Drawing on forty thousand pages of Grinnell’s correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro’s enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell’s nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision—a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.

This devotional paraphrase brings the thoughts expressed in the Bible into clear focus.The result is that you find not only more understanding in reading the Bible, but more joy. Perfect for devotional reading, this edition features an easier-to-use format.

This book focuses on strategies to achieve economic diversification in Asian landlocked countries. It does so by analysing the impact of the Dutch disease, non-resource firm heterogeneity, trade logistics operations, trade facilitation, aid for trade, small and medium-sized enterprises, and foreign direct investment. Offering a wide range of expert views and opinions, research findings, information and data, the book will be of value to policy makers and students of trade and development economics.

Roy Bedichek spent most of his life working in the educational field in Texas, but his main interest was always the great outdoors. His first book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, was published when he was almost seventy, and his second, Karánkaway Country, appeared three years later. Both were the result of a lifetime of exploring a beloved land, of searching observation, of discussion, debate, wide reading, and reflection. Long out of print, Karánkaway Country is now available in a handsome second edition with a new Foreword by W. W. Newcomb, Jr. Karánkaway Country focuses on the natural history of a strip of coastal prairie lying roughly between Corpus Christi and Galveston and once inhabited by the poorly known and much maligned Karankawa Indians. It serves as home base for an exposition of Bedichek's philosophy, providing a convenient local setting for richly tailored essays on wildlife, soil, human skin, and a variety of other topics suggested by a wide-ranging intellect. Bedichek's philosophy, if it can be reduced to a few words, is essentially that humans must learn to live on peaceful and conciliatory terms with our natural environment.