2025 Winner of the Conservation Society of San Antonio Publication AwardAround 1848 Wilhelm Friedrich, a young German immigrant to Texas, completed three drawings that capture unique details of life on the frontier. Friedrich’s sketches feature Comanches, Germans, a captive girl, a wagon train, the landscape and wildlife of the Texas Hill Country, and dynamic scenes of cultural contact. Friedrich is the only artist known to have produced contemporaneous images of a Comanche captive...

Ferdinand Lindheimer was already renowned as the father of Texas botany when, in late 1852, he became the founding editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, a German-language weekly newspaper for the German settler community on the Central Texas frontier. His first year of publication was a pivotal time for the settlers and the American Indians whose territories they occupied. Based on an analysis of the paper’s first year—and drawing on methods from documentary and narrative history, ethnohi...

Winner, 2018 Presidio La Bahia Award, sponsored by the Sons of the Republic of TexasIn 1851, an article appeared in a German journal, Geographisches Jahrbuch (Geographic Yearbook), that sought to establish definitive connections, using language observations, among the Comanches, Shoshones, and Apaches. Heinrich Berghaus’s study was based on lexical data gathered by a young German settler in Texas, Emil Kriewitz, and included a groundbreaking list of Comanche words and thei...

John Chapel died with the name of a woman on his lips who didn't exist-a man destroyed by a story no one else believed.A decorated detective once known for his razor-sharp mind, he spent his final months chasing shadows through rain-soaked memories, consumed by a phantom that existed only in the pages of his journal and the darkest corners of his unraveling mind. That leather-bound journal chronicled this descent-ink-stained pages filled with visions that materialized whenever the ...

"The deceiver knows the Hungarian, the wise man keeps twenty-six ghosts in his library, and the widow carries the words of the dead."This is the final, cryptic entry scrawled in the journal belonging to the late John Chapel – a journal that detailed his obsession with finding a woman who didn't exist. Hers was just one of several faces that he insisted he saw there in the rain, and one of the many voices that called to him every night, drawing him further into madness. Despite his ...

“The deceiver knows the Hungarian, the wise man keeps twenty-six ghosts in his library, and the widow carries the words of the dead.”This is the final, cryptic entry scrawled in the journal belonging to the late John Chapel – a journal that detailed his obsession with finding a woman who didn’t exist. Hers was just one of several faces that he insisted he saw there in the rain, and one of the many voices that called to him every night, drawing him further into madness. Despite his ...

“The deceiver knows the Hungarian, the wise man keeps twenty-six ghosts in his library, and the widow carries the words of the dead.”This is the final, cryptic entry scrawled in the journal belonging to the late John Chapel – a journal that detailed his obsession with finding a woman who didn’t exist. Hers was just one of several faces that he insisted he saw there in the rain, and one of the many voices that called to him every night, drawing him further into madness. Des...

George Furnace, flight instructor at Baston Aero Club, dies instantly when his plane crashes into the English countryside. People who knew him are baffled – Furnace was a first-rate pilot, and the plane was in perfect condition – and the inquest records a verdict of death by misadventure. An Australian visitor to the aero club, Edwin Marriott, Bishop of Cootamundra, suspects that the true story is more complicated. Could this be a dramatic suicide – or even murder? Together with Inspector ...

"The Deceiver knows the Hungarian...the wise man keeps twenty-six ghosts in his library...and the widow carries the words of the dead." (translated from Latin) This is the final cryptic entry scrawled in the journal of the late John Chapel - a journal that detailed his obsession with finding a woman who didn't exist. Hers was just one of many faces he insisted that he saw there in the rain - calling out to him every night, pulling him further into madness. She could only watch helplessly a...

Old Classic cars and Tools layed out with auto parts

Comedy about the ruling family of Renaissance Italy's most inconsequential city-stateIn Monte Guano, a ridiculously small and penniless principality in Renaissance Italy, Prince Ludovico II finds his rule constantly undermined by those around him: his shrewd wife, his official mistress, and his three disappointing - if not outright humiliating - sons.As well as having to manage the ever-increasing tributes demanded by the Pope, Prince Ludovico must also con...