The Handy Texas Answer Book (The Handy Answer Book Series) - Softcover

Haley, James L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578596343 ISBN 13: 9781578596348

Verlag: Visible Ink Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating and fun look at the Lone Star State’s history, culture, and people

Texas is the country's second-largest state by size and population. It has a unique and varied history, having been ruled by a succession of nations—from which the term “six flags over Texas” sprang—before becoming an independent republic. From its traditional oil, cattle, and cotton industries to the modern energy, electronics, computer, aerospace, and biomedical industries, Texas has become an economic powerhouse. It’s known for its low taxes, diverse population, thriving universities, and art scenes. Exploring the state’s fascinating history, people, myths, culture, and trivia, The Handy Texas Answer Book takes an in-depth look at this fascinating and diverse state with the bigger-than-life personality.

Learn about the original Indigenous peoples, the Spanish, French, and Mexican colonizations, the independence from Mexico, the ties to the Confederacy and United States, devastating hurricanes, football culture, fast-growing cities and urban sprawl, food, attitude, and much, much more. Tour landmarks from the Alamo and cattle ranches to the Rio Grande and the state capital. Learn about famous sons and daughters, including Lyndon Johnson, Sam Houston, Howard Hughes, Janis Joplin, and Renée Zellweger. Sports, the government, parks, and cultural institutions are all packed into this comprehensive guide to the state of Texas. Find answers to more than 950 questions, including:

What accounts for Texas’s odd shape?

Why was Sam Houston such a polarizing figure?

Why did Mexico invade Texas in 1842?

What was the origin of the rodeo?

What were the final terms on which Texas entered the Union?

What Texas country boy changed Texas law forever by breaking his leg?

What are the natural divisions within the Panhandle-Plains?

How did Texas become such a locus of evangelical churches?

How big do alligators get in Texas?

What was the world’s first enclosed, air-conditioned sports stadium?

How many rattlesnakes are dispatched at the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup?

Is it true that the modern computer chip began in Texas?

Illustrating the unique character of the state through a combination of facts, stats, and history, as well as the unusual and quirky, The Handy Texas Answer Book answers your Texas questions about people, places, events, government, and locations! This informative book also includes a helpful bibliography, an appendix of governors and presidents, a thorough historical timeline, and an extensive index, adding to its usefulness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James L. Haley is one of Texas’s most distinguished historians. His first book, The Buffalo War, remains the definitive history of the last Indian war on the South Plains and has been in print for forty years. His biography, Sam Houston, won nine different awards, including the Tullis Prize of the Texas State Historical Association, the Spur Award of the Western Writers of America, and the Book Award of the Philosophical Society of Texas. His 650-page compendium of Texas history, Passionate Nation, won the T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award of the Texas Historical Commission. Most recently, after ghost writing the memoirs of famous Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson, he completed a history of the Texas Supreme Court for the University of Texas Press; his latest books, The Shores of Tripoli (2016), A Darker Sea (2017), and the upcoming The Devil in Paradise, are in the Bliven Putnam Naval Adventure Series for G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Haley grew up in Fort Worth, graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Arlington, and attended the UT School of Law in Austin. He resides in Austin, Texas.

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Just how big is Texas?
From 1845 until 1959, Texas was by far the largest state in the Union. When Alaska was admitted, Texans had to endure a good deal of teasing for no longer being the biggest―which left Texans to counter that, at least, Texas was not frozen nine months of the year. Texas covers 268,581 square miles. Compared to other American states, it is about the same size as the sixteen smallest states combined. Or looking west, it is larger than Washington, Oregon, and Idaho combined (with Maryland left over). On an international scale, it is about twice the size of Germany. As nations go, if it were independent again it would rank 40th in size, after Chile (292,258 square miles) and Zambia (290,584), and ahead of Myanmar (formerly Burma, 261,228 square miles), Afghanistan (251,830 square miles), and Somalia (246,199 square miles).

What are Texas’s dimensions?
Texas’s extreme dimensions are north to south (from Dallam County in the upper northwest to Cameron County and Brownsville in the south), 790 miles. From east to west (from El Paso in the west to Newton County on the Louisiana border), it stretches 773 miles.

Where is Texas’s geographical center?
The very center of the state is in McCulloch County, about fifteen miles northwest of the town of Brady: 437 miles west to the Rio Grande beyond El Paso; 412 miles northwest to the corner of the Panhandle; 401 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, and 341 miles east to the farthest bend of the Sabine River. The point was reckoned not by equal mileage to the state’s extremities, but by dividing the state into equal areas, and the spot is noted by a marker on U.S. Highway 377, 2 miles south of Farm-to-Market Road 502.

How many counties does Texas have?
There are 254 counties in Texas, more than in any other state. They range in population from about 4.6 million in Harris County, which contains most of the city of Houston, down to 113 souls in Loving County, in the West Texas oil patch. The smallest in area is Rockwall County, near Dallas, at 127 square miles, to Brewster County in the Trans-Pecos, whose 6,192 square miles is larger than Connecticut.

What is the origin of the state’s famous nickname?
The imagery of Texas as the Lone Star took hold during the Texas revolution for independence from Mexico in 1836, but no one knows for a certainty how it originated. There are a number of possibilities. One of the stronger contenders is this one: When Santa Anna canceled the Mexican constitution and assumed dictatorial powers, rebellions broke out in as many as eleven states. One of the most dangerous threats to him was the dual state of Coahuila y Tejas, and he sent an army to the state capital and broke up the legislature. Many Mexican federalists fled to Texas to continue the fight. The state’s flag had been the Mexican tricolor with two stars, one each for its two components, Coahuila and Texas. After Coahuila fell, the Texas star was the only one left holding out the hope of a democratic government.

How did “Friendship” become the Texas motto?
Texans are famous for their hospitality, an ethic that became entrenched during frontier days, when traveling strangers often spent the night at roadside homes, and were not usually allowed to offer payment. That fits the motto, but it is not the origin. In 1690, the first Spanish mission was established near the later site of Nacogdoches, among the Tejas Indians, a name that meant “friend” or “ally.” So, Texas actually does mean friend.

Does Texas have a state flower?
The legislature named the Texas bluebonnet as the state flower in 1901. Lupinus texensis is endemic to Texas, widely distributed, and became a cultural icon through the landscape paintings of Julian Onderdonk a century ago. Grayish-purple in dry years, but an electric violet-blue with good rainfall, vast acreages of central Texas are carpeted with them in spring, usually peaking in mid-April, interspersed with scarlet spikes of Indian Paintbrush and the pale wash of Pink Evening Primrose. The sight of whole vistas of them is unforgettable. Since the 1960s the Texas Highway Department has planted long stretches of right-of-way in bluebonnets and their associated species both for their beauty and their effectiveness in erosion control.

What are other state symbols?
The pecan became the Texas State Tree in 1919; the majestic trees over a hundred feet tall can live for centuries, and Texas has long led the nation in production of native pecans, now augmented with bred varieties. The mockingbird, noted both for its peerless singing and for its fierce defense of its nest, was named the Texas State Bird in 1927.

In more recent years, various lobbying groups and industrial councils have leaned on the legislature to proclaim a silly number of additional state “symbols:” a state stone (petrified palmwood, 1969), a state dish (chili con carne, 1977), a state reptile (horny toad, 1993), a state insect (monarch butterfly, 1995), a state plant (as opposed to tree or flower, prickly pear cactus, 1995), a state vegetable (sweet onion, 1997), a state snack (chips and salsa, 2003), a state dog breed (blue lacy, 2005), a state cobbler (peach, 2013), not to be outdone by a state pie (pecan, 2013).

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Visible Ink Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1578596343
• ISBN 13: 9781578596348
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland