A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City”Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people—scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic ...

In Zane Grey's poignant novel, "The Call of the Canyon," readers are whisked away to the stunning landscapes of the American Southwest. Through rich, vivid descriptions and evocative prose, Grey masterfully intertwines themes of love, nature, and the quest for identity, crafting a narrative that celebrates the rugged individualism of early 20th-century America. The novel's literary style reflects Grey's background as a writer and a fisherman, using a romantically idealized view of the West...

Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells of the High Plains farmers who fled drought and dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience.Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

John Myers Myers authored sixteen books, including Doc Holliday and Tombstone's Early Years, also available as Bison Books.

On a chilly October afternoon in 1881, two brothers named Tom and Frank McLaury were gunned down on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona, by the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. The deadly event became known as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and in a quirk of fate, the brothers names became well-known, but only as bad men and outlaws. Did they deserve that reputation? The McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona: An O.K. Corral Obituary explores this question, revealing details of their family backgro...

In the Spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union, a hard-fought and bitter controversy that profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, the battle over Texas marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear. One of America's renowned political historians, Silbey o...

"It's every bit as fascinating to read about the battles between the Cowboys and the Texans as it is to follow today's never-ending NFL dramas." —Mike Florio, ProFootballTalkIn the 1960s, on the heels of the "Greatest Game Ever Played," professional football began to flourish across the country—except in Texas, where college football was still the only game in town. But in an unlikely series of events, two young oil tycoons started their own professional football fr...

The town of White Oaks, New Mexico Territory, was born in 1879 when prospectors discovered gold at nearby Baxter Mountain. In Gold-Mining Boomtown, Roberta Key Haldane offers an intimate portrait of the southeastern New Mexico community by profiling more than forty families and individuals who made their homes there during its heyday.Today, fewer than a hundred people live in White Oaks. Its frontier incarnation, located a scant twenty-eight miles from the notorious Lincol...

San Antonio native, military veteran, merchant, and mayor pro tem José Antonio Menchaca (1800–1879) was one of only a few Tejano leaders to leave behind an extensive manuscript of recollections. Portions of the document were published in 1907, followed by a “corrected” edition in 1937, but the complete work could not be published without painstaking reconstruction. At last available in its entirety, Menchaca’s book of reminiscences captures the social life, people, and events that shaped t...

Almost a century and a half went into the making of My Eighty Years in Texas. It began as a diary, kept by fifteen-year-old William Physick Zuber after he joined Sam Houston’s Texas army in 1836, hoping he could emulate the heroism of American Revolutionary patriots. Although his hopes were never realized, Zuber recorded the privations, victories, and defeats of armies on the move during the Texas Revolution, the Indian campaigns, and, as he styled it, the Confederate War. In 1910, at the age...

Famous Trees of Texas was first published in 1970 by the Texas Forest Service (now Texas A&M Forest Service), an organization created in 1915 and charged with protecting and sustaining the forests, trees, and other related natural resources of Texas.For the 100-year anniversary of TFS, the agency presents a new edition of this classic book, telling the stories of 101 trees throughout the state.Some are old friends, featured in the first edition and still alive (27 ...

This book is intended to be used as a textbook and research reference for the field of nuclear nonproliferation. The book is primarily technical and focussed on methods of detecting clandestine nuclear material that might be illicitly transported. The book also touches on nuclear forensics, i.e. methods for identification, attribution, and establishment of transport pathways for illicit nuclear material. Also covered are topics of methods used for arms control and treaty verification, and ...