Out on the Texas Plains, wrangling with history resembles taking in the sunset--a stampede of splendor and shadow all at once. Roam an Ohio-sized patch of prairie and take stock of the heroic tasks and moral dilemmas facing the unforgettable characters who called West Texas home. Ben Hogan sinks a putt with the focus of the Clovis man who hunted mammoth in the same spot thousands of years before. Lubbock's largest lawsuit runs its interminable course. And a starving Roy Rogers makes a quick meal of jackrabbit on the Llano Estacado. Chuck Lanehart gathers statesmen and journalists, outlaws and entertainers, in these profiles of the Texas Plains.

Assemble a composite portrait of the Texas plains through these historic tales. Many thousands of years ago, Clovis Man hunted huge mammoths here. More recently, Waylon Jennings drew his musical inspiration here. In the intervening time, the Texas prairie has been the backdrop for the wildest of Wild West shootouts, landmark legal battles and epic achievements in sports, music and medicine. Familiar icons like Roy Orbison and Dan Blocker, as well as forgotten characters like Charlie "Squirrel-Eye" Emory and John "the Catfish Kid" Gough all helped shape the colorful history of the Texas Plains. Who shot the sheriff? Who was the earliest American? Who invented the slam dunk? Author Chuck Lanehart answers these questions and many more in a wide-ranging collection of stories.

Accept an invitation to the boundary-pushing heritage of the Texas Plains, from the first American Thanksgiving feast in the 1500s to Amarillo's iconic seventy-two-ounce steak challenge five hundred years later. Even the limitless horizons of the Panhandle couldn't contain the notes of musical pioneers like Mac Davis, Bobby Keys and the Velvets. Take a dip in Lubbock's oldest swimming hole or share a sip with Pinkie Roden, the benevolent bootlegger of West Texas. Keep an eye out for longballs from Justiceburg's "Stormin' Norman" Cash and stray bats in Doodlebug Line's Clarity Tunnel. Join Chuck Lanehart as he tracks the long-standing traditions and unexpected twists of life on the Texas Plains.

The American Civil War divided the United States from 1861-1865. During those years, over two million soldiers served in both the Union and Confederate Armies. What is little known is that not only the numerous children, some as young 12, enlisted on both sides, but also women who disguised themselves as men in an attempt to make a difference in the epic struggle to determine the future of the United States of America.

In the winter of 1901, James W. Jarrott led a band of twenty-five homesteader families toward the Llano Estacado in far West Texas, newly opened for settlement by a populist Texas legislature. But frontier cattlemen who had been pasturing their herds on the unfenced prairie land were enraged by the encroachment of these “nesters.” In August 1902 a famous hired assassin, Jim Miller, ambushed and murdered J. W. Jarrott. Who hired Miller? This crime has never been solved, until now. Award-winning author Bill Neal investigates this cold case and successfully pieces together all the threads of circumstantial evidence to fit the noose snugly around the neck of Jim Miller’s employer. What emerges from these pages is the strength of intriguing characters in an engrossing narrative: Jim Jarrott, the diminutive advocate who fearlessly champions the cause of the little guy. The ruthless and slippery assassin, Deacon Jim Miller. And finally Jarrott’s young widow Mollie, who perseveres and prospers against great odds and tells the settlers to “Stay put!”

Since cinema's earliest days, literary adaptation has provided the movies with stories; and so we use literary terms like metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche to describe visual things. But there is another way of looking at film, and that is through its relationship with the visual arts – mainly painting, the oldest of the art forms. Art History for Filmmakers is an inspiring guide to how images from art can be used by filmmakers to establish period detail, and to teach composition, color theory and lighting. The book looks at the key moments in the development of the Western painting, and how these became part of the Western visual culture from which cinema emerges, before exploring how paintings can be representative of different genres, such as horror, sex, violence, realism and fantasy, and how the images in these paintings connect with cinema. Insightful case studies explore the links between art and cinema through the work of seven high-profile filmmakers, including Peter Greenaway, Peter Webber, Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino and Stan Douglas. A range of practical exercises are included in the text, which can be carried out singly or in small teams. Featuring stunning full-color images, Art History for Filmmakers provides budding filmmakers with a practical guide to how images from art can help to develop their understanding of the visual language of film.

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows. The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature. This e-book includes a sample chapter of THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN.