11.15.15   New series focuses on women in Texas history

Texas A&M University Press has announced a new book series, Women in Texas History, sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation.

“Books in the series,” write editors Nancy Baker Jones and Cynthia Beeman, “will focus on individual lives, events, and eras, as well as aspects of gender, race, class, and culture.”

The first book in the series is a biography, Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas by Austin College history professor Light Townsend Cummins ($35 hardcover).

Tennant (1892–1971), Cummins notes, was “one of the best-known sculptors in Texas during her lifetime,” especially for the “Tejas Warrior” sculpture in Dallas’s Fair Park. “Her historical importance,” he adds, “stemmed not only from her art but also from her contributions to the development of cultural life in Dallas.”

And, he adds, she “played an important role in improving the status of women in Texas” from the 1920s to the 1960s.

As part of the Women in Texas History series, two previously published books are being reissued in new paperback editions this fall:

A Texas Suffragist: Diaries and Writings of Jane Y. McCallum (1878–1957), edited by Janet G. Humphrey ($22.95)

Citizen at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas, edited by Ruthe Winegarten and Judith N. McArthur ($24.95)

Read more about all three titles on the A&M Press webstie, www.tamupress.com.

Legendary Texas Ranger: “I’m Frank Hamer”: The Life of a Texas Peace Officer by John H. Jenkins and Gordon Frost, originally published in 1968, has been reissued in a new paperback edition by State House Press ($24.95).

The 264 page biography includes about 75 pages of old photos, including more than 30 pages from the Clyde Barrow–Bonnie Parker case, for which Hamer would become best known.

“It will be a long time,” someone wrote after Hamer’s death, “before another officer as picturesque and as blunt, as stubborn and as fearless, will pass this way again.” Hamer “participated in probably more gunfights than any other Ranger of his times,” wrote longtime Department of Public Safety Director Homer Garrison, “was wounded 17 times, left for dead four times, and never once backed away from a fight.”

Texas ABC: I Love Texas: An ABC Adventure by author/artist/entrepreneur Sandra Magsamen (Sourcebooks, $12.99 hardcover) isn’t written by a Texan, but she’s on target with her clever rhyming text and appealing illustrations about armadillos, bluebonnets, cowboys, dude ranches, El Paso, football, Galveston, and so on.

“W is for West Texas, the birthplace of cowboy hats and boots,” she writes, while “X is for XOXO because we love having Texas roots.”

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Glenn Dromgoole, is co-author, with Carlton Stowers, of 101 Essential Texas Books Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.