Big Wonderful Thing
Subtitle: A History of Texas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Austin, TX
Language: eng
Format: ebook
ISBN-13: 9781477320037
Copyright date: 2019
Description: The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.

“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”

Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.

Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
Table of contents: title: Castaways; title: Golden cities; title: "Woe to us"; title: The lady in blue; title: Voyageurs; title: God's work; title: Filibusters; title: "God speed ye"; title: The Texas dream; title: The consequence of failure; title: Come and take it; title: "The Alamo is ours!"; title: Vengeance; title: Aftermath; title: Spartan spirit; title: "Savage ware fare"; title: The broken flagpole; title: Los diablos tejanos; title: The crisis of the crisis; title: Robbers and lawyers; title: Warriors and refugees; title: "I will never do it"; title: "With throbbing hearts"; title: Reconstructed; title: The end of Comancheria; title: Fenced in; title: The "peril" of legislation; title: Bipedal brutes; title: Scorpions and horny toads; title: A thousand little devils; title: Gushers; title: Light coming on the plains; title: Sediciosos; title: Pa; title: War at home and abroad; title: The blacksnake whip; title: Music and mayhem; title: The boy from the hill country; title: Centennial; title: Passionate ones; title: Texans at war again; title: The show of shows; title: A new Texas; title: Ye shall know the truth; title: The lord takes a sleeping pill; title: Giant; title: A gamblin' man; title: Welcome Mr. Kennedy; title: "El deguello" reprise; title: The voice of god; title: The tower; title: Vigil on the pedernales; title: A side to belong to; title: Don't be so self-righteous; title: Baptism of fire; title: Texans versus Texans; title: Epilogue. Davy Crockett's fairy palace