Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was one of the highest-profile personalities among the Apollo astronauts, renowned for his outspokenness and potent views but also recognized as a warm and well-liked person who devoted much of his life after retiring from NASA to sharing his spaceflight experiences. Worden had nearly finished writing ......
The Life of Ten Bears is a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century Comanche oral histories given by Francis Joseph "Joe A" Attocknie. Although various elements of Ten Bears's life (ca. 1790-1872) are widely known, including several versions of how the toddler Ten Bears survived the massacre of his family, other parts have not been as widely ......
What we know of Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917) is more myth than man. Yet the stage persona that took audiences by storm was based on the very real encounters of William F. Cody with the American West. This autobiography, infused with the drama of dime novels and stage melodramas that would transform the author into an American icon, recounts a ......
In the tradition of the meditative essay, the writing of Robert Vivian begins with a mundane moment and, through the delicate workings of curiosity, contemplation, and inspiration, reveals unsuspected meaning. In his second collection of essays Vivian finds his occasions in midwestern towns and European cities. He looks for-and sometimes stumbles ......
Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this work of literary nonfiction conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West. On nineteen thousand acres of combined public and private land in southwest Colorado, Kathryn Wilder and her son, with ......
Texas, Workingmen, and Professional Baseball in 1888
The Texas League's first baseball season in 1888 took place during a turbulent political, economic, and cultural time in Texas. Amid the millions of acres of wild and rural Texas frontier boomed the cities of Galveston, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin, where the new state capitol building had just opened. The Texas economy was ......
For centuries, a persistent and important component of Lakota religious life has been the Inipi, the ritual of the sweat lodge. The sweat lodge has changed little in appearance since its first recorded description in the late seventeenth century. The ritual itself consists of songs, prayers, and other actions conducted in a tightly enclosed, dark, ......
First published in Germany in 1894, after being banned in Russia, The Kingdom of God Is within You reveals Tolstoy's world outlook after his conversion to Christianity. He argues that the kingdom of God is within reach of all. The core of the book deals with his non-resistance to evil, a principle Tolstoy passionately advocated. Gandhi was won ......
In her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, "The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1." What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in ......