[PDF] Hard Times And The Mule Died eBook

Author : Janet Williams Pollard
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 38,61 MB
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1603444793

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Clayton Wheat Williams—West Texas oilman, rancher, civic leader, veteran of the Great War, and avocational historian—was a risk taker, who both reflected and molded the history of his region. His life spanned a dynamic period in Texas history when automobiles replaced horse-drawn wagons, electricity replaced steam power in the oilfields, and barren and virtually worthless ranch land became valuable for the oil and gas under its surface. The setting for Williams’s story, like that of his father before him, is Fort Stockton in the rugged Trans-Pecos region of Texas. As a youngster accompanying his father on surveying trips through the land, and subsequently as a cadet at Texas A&M, he developed a toughness that served him well in France and Flanders. His letters home provide an unusually nuanced picture of what life was like for an American officer in Europe during the Great War. After the war, he returned home, where he taught himself petroleum geology—so effectively that he picked the site of what would become in 1928 the deepest producing oil well in the world. With his brother, he mapped the structure of what later became the Fort Stockton oil and gas field, and he went on to hammer out a successful career in the boom and bust cycles of the West Texas oil industry. On the civic front, Williams served for fourteen years as a Pecos County commissioner, and he held offices in a number of social and civic organizations. Imbued with a deep love for the history of his region, he wrote (with the editorial help of historian Ernest Wallace at Texas Tech University) Texas’ Last Frontier: Fort Stockton and the Trans-Pecos, 1861–1895, published by Texas A&M University Press in 1982. Nonetheless, by some of his neighbors he may be best remembered for his role in drying up the town’s famous Comanche Springs by pumping water feeding the spring’s aquifer to irrigate his and others’ farms west of town. Williams left behind a treasure trove of letters, personal papers and writings, and interviews with his family, helping document in rich detail the history of an unforgiving land as well as what life was like during a pivotal period of American history. These materials, which form the core of the present manuscript, reveal a life that made a difference in the economy and history of the region and the nation at large.

Author : James V. Lyles
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 34,9 MB
Release : 2014-06-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1499032455

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James Lyles has written an absorbing memoir of his life, beginning as an impoverished child in Depression-era Arkansas and eventually becoming a highly educated and well-traveled religious leader of a major Protestant denomination. His story spans the most important era of African American advancement in the post-slavery period. He was an eyewitness as well as a participant in that half-century of the black liberation struggle... Growing up in rural Arkansas in the midst of the Great Depression, he describes an early life reminiscent of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road of the 1930s and '40s. The account could serve as a documented history of African American life during that time. His narrative is written also against the backdrop of some of the most memorable civil rights incidents, such as the Little Rock High School integration riots and the killing of Emmett Till. Also, he relates in telling detail the little-reported story of the racial integration of Perkins School of Theology on the campus of Southern Methodist University--an event in which he was a participant. As an ordained clergyman, his adventures and misadventures, took him to small towns, large cities, college campuses, the armed forces, a foreign mission bureaucracy, and the continent of Africa, all of which he relates with remarkable candor. Jim Lyles's exciting memoir illustrates how many splendored a life of faith can be.

Author : Studs Terkel
Publisher : New Press/ORIM
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 22,98 MB
Release : 2012-03-20
Category : History
ISBN : 1595585761

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America’s most inspirational voices, in their own words: “If you’re looking for a reason to act and dream again, you’ll find it in the pages of this book” (Chicago Tribune). Published when Studs Terkel was ninety-one years old, this astonishing oral history tackles one of the famed journalist’s most elusive subjects: Hope. Where does it come from? What are its essential qualities? How do we sustain it in the darkest of times? An alternative, more personal chronicle of the “American century,” Hope Dies Last is a testament to the indefatigable spirit that Studs has always embodied, and an inheritance for those who, by taking a stand, are making concrete the dreams of today. A former death row inmate who served nearly twenty years for a crime he did not commit discusses his never-ending fight for justice. Tom Hayden, author of The Port Huron Statement, contemplates the legacy of 1960s student activism. Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith reflects on the enduring problem of corporate malfeasance. From a doctor who teaches his young students compassion to the retired brigadier general who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, these interviews tell us much about the power of the American dream and the force of individuals who advocate for a better world. With grace and warmth, Terkel’s subjects express their secret hopes and dreams. Taken together, this collection of interviews tells an inspiring story of optimism and persistence, told in voices that resonate with the eloquence of conviction. “The value of Hope Dies Last lies not in what it teaches readers about its narrow subject, but in the fascinating stories it reveals, and the insight it allows into the vast range of human experience.” —The A.V. Club “Very Terkelesque—by now the man requires an adjective of his own.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Review of Books “An American treasure.” —Cornel West

Author : Alan Conway
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 28,48 MB
Release : 1961-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0816657378

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The Welsh in America was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The Welsh formed a small but significant part of the great migration from Europe to the United States during the nineteenth century. In this volume they tell their own story in letters they wrote from America to their families and friends back home. The letters are highly readable, written, for the most part, in vivid and entertaining style which reveals the Welsh as an unusually literate people. The 197 letters are arranged chronologically and geographically, starting with letters that tell of the voyage across the Atlantic. Once in America, the immigrants described their experiences in the farming country of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and some of the other midwestern states. Later, as the frontier moved west, they wrote of their efforts to establish exclusive Welsh settlements on the Great Plains. From the industrial centers there are letters from coal miners and iron and steel workers. The fortune seekers who went to California in the gold rush or to the mines in Colorado are also represented. Still others tell of their search for salvation in the Mormon Zion of Utah. For each chapter or group of letters Mr. Conway has written an introduction giving the general background of the region or period and relating it to the Welsh settlers. Thus the events chronicled and the views expressed in the letters become significant in the history of the times. The majority of the letters were written in Welsh and they appear here in translation. Some were obtained from the files of old newspapers or denominational magazines; others came from the collections of the National Library of Wales or from individuals.

Author : J. Marshall Craig
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 22,92 MB
Release : 2003-09-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 146972359X

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70 Years After Its Debut, The First Canadian War Play Has Been Exhaustively Researched and Restored For This Limited-Edition Volume.