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In American Venice: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River, Lewis F. Fisher uncovers the evolution of San Antonio’s beloved River Walk. He shares how San Antonians refused to give up on the vital water source that provided for them from before the city’s beginnings. In 1941 neglect, civic uprisings, and bursts of creativity culminated in the completion of a Works Projects Administration project designed by Robert H. H. Hugman.

The resulting River Walk languished for years but enjoyed renewed interest during the 1968 World’s Fair, held in San Antonio, and has since become the center of the city’s cultural and historical narrative.

“The real story [of the River Walk] is a bit less Hollywood but far more interesting . . . With a growing number of cities facing issues of water supply, urban runoff, flooding, and ways of rebuilding better after a disaster, the San Antonio River Walk remains a great example of getting it right,” writes Irby Hightower, co-chair of the San Antonio River Oversight Committee.

In this updated and expanded edition of River Walk: The Epic Story of San Antonio’s River, Fisher offers more fascinating stories about the River Walk’s evolution, bringing to light new facts and sharing historical images that he has since discovered. The update includes information about the Museum and Mission Reaches, two expansions of the River Walk that are vital to San Antonio’s continued growth as the seventh largest city in the country.

Fisher starts his story with the first written records of the river, in the 1690s, and continues through the 1800s and the flood of 1921, to debates over transforming the river and its eventual role as the crown jewel of Texas, and finally to its recent expansion. More than a community attraction, the River Walk’s banks are also a giant botanical garden full of plants and trees. Indeed, the American Society for Horticulture has named the River Walk a Horticultural Landmark. As Fisher says, the River Walk “remains a work in progress, one forever precarious and unfinished yet standing before the world as a triumph of enterprise and human imagination.”

King Ranch. The name is embroidered in the tapestry of Texas, rising from the sunbaked coastal plains in the infancy of the state itself. King Ranch is the inspiration of legends and speculation, tradition and history. Rawhide-tough through drought, Indian attacks, Civil War, and the Great Depression, among other trials, King Ranch is the star of Texas.

Now the memoirs of Helen King Kleberg Alexander-Groves, the only child of Bob and Helen Kleberg, give a personal glimpse of life on the storied ranch of the Kings and the Klebergs. This intimate and compelling book chronicles not only the history of the ranch but also the life of Bob and Helen Kleberg, the first family of cattle ranching. From the Santa Gertrudis, the first cattle breed developed in America and the first breed recognized worldwide in over a century, to the Triple Crown–winning Thoroughbred Assault, Bob and Helen Kleberg changed the ranching industry. The memoirs of “Helenita” open the door to the romance of Southwest cattle ranching, as well as the grit, glory, and inner workings of King Ranch in Texas and its ranches around the world.

With over 200 photographs, some by Toni Frissell and many by her close friend and fellow photographer Helen Kleberg herself, this lavishly illustrated portrait includes accounts of the Klebergs’ famous hospitality, extended not only to the celebrities who were entertained regularly but also to the Kineños, the loyal ranch hands first brought to King Ranch by Captain King. Hemingwayesque photos depict hunting adventures in the Texas brush country—for which the ranch is still famous.

Bob and Helen Kleberg of King Ranch is a view from the center of the King Ranch legacy, perpetuated now for some 150 years. Bob and Helen Kleberg of King Ranch is a requisite addition to the library of any ranching, history, or Texana aficionado.

Brackenridge Park began its life as a heavily wooded, bucolic driving park at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the next 120 years it evolved into the sprawling, multifaceted jewel San Antonians enjoy today, home to the San Antonio Zoo, the state’s first public golf course, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Sunken Garden Theater, and the Witte Museum.

The land that Brackenridge Park occupies, near the San Antonio River headwaters, has been reinvented many times over. People have gathered there since prehistoric times. Following the city’s founding in 1718, the land was used to channel river water into town via a system of acequias; its limestone cliffs were quarried for building materials; and it was the site of a Civil War tannery, headquarters for two military camps, a plant nursery, and a racetrack.

The park continues to be a  site of national acclaim even while major sections have fallen into disrepair. The more than 400 acres that constitute San Antonio’s flagship urban park are made up of half a dozen parcels stitched together over time to create an uncommon varied landscape. Uniquely San Antonian, Brackenridge is full of romantic wooded walks and whimsical public spaces drawing tourists, locals, wildlife, and waterfowl.

Extensively researched and illustrated with some two hundred archival photographs and vintage postcards, Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park is the first comprehensive look at the fascinating story of this unique park and how its diverse layers evolved to create one of the city’s foremost gathering places.

East Austin, just across Interstate 35 from Austin, Texas’s capital city, is a historically working-class neighborhood that in recent years has become an arts district and hotbed for real estate developers targeting a young urban population. The shops and restaurants that for decades served Latino and African American residents are being crowded out by coffee shops, cocktail bars, and upscale bakeries hoping to attract newer residents. The resulting tensions, part of a trend debated in cities across the country, have received national media attention.

After years of observing the fragmentation of east Austin’s Latino and African American communities, photographer John Langmore began to chronicle the historic neighborhood and its residents. His aim was to capture the gentrifying neighborhood’s unique nature and to make Texans aware of the people and places negatively affected by the state’s growth.

Fault Lines features more than a hundred color and black-and-white photographs taken between 2006 and 2010, during which time Langmore was fully aware that the window for capturing the east Austin community was rapidly closing. Indeed today many of the neighborhood places, and even the people, have been lost to development and increasing rents and property taxes.

The book features a foreword by Michael King, a longtime political reporter for the Austin Chronicle; essays by east Austin resident Wilhelmina Delco, Austin’s first African American elected official and a ten-term member of the Texas House of Representatives, and Johnny Limón, a sixty-six-year resident of east Austin and a prominent member of the neighborhood’s Latino community; and an epilogue by Langmore.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, just as color postcards were becoming a worldwide sensation, San Antonio bypassed Dallas as the largest city in Texas. Idyllic postcard images of San Antonio began landing in mailboxes across the country, displaying recently gained wealth and prosperity. Greetings from San Antonio: Historic Postcards of the Alamo City is a collection of more than six hundred color and black-and-white photo postcards, many of them quite rare, that yield a compelling visual narrative of the city during this pivotal period.

Large buildings like Joske’s department store and the Milam Building, railroad stations, mansions on paved streets, the 343-acre Brackenridge Park, and plush hotels such as the Saint Anthony Hotel and the Gunter Hotel replaced dusty frontier streetscapes at the turn of the century. This delighted postcard publishers, who gave proud residents and curious visitors alike the opportunity to mail images of a modern city worldwide. As the midcentury approached, postcards’ peak in popularity faded, along with San Antonio’s title as the largest city in the state.

Greetings from San Antonio presents a portrait essential to understanding the modern origins of this distinctive American city. Daily life is captured through seldom-seen images of downtown⁠, including the Alamo⁠, and early suburban neighborhoods, churches and schools, and entertainment venues and festivals like the annual citywide celebration Fiesta. Special attention is given to San Antonio’s emerging reputation as a military city, with images of early army and air bases—Fort Sam Houston, Lackland Air Force Base, Camp Bullis, and Brooks, Kelly, and Randolph Fields. Highlights include postcards showing the San Antonio–based pursuit of Pancho Villa and the city’s role as a hub for military preparations for World Wars I and II. Taken as a whole, Greetings from San Antonio is a captivating and unique portrayal of the city during the early years of its transformation into the multicultural mecca it is today.

Brown and Holley are interested in place and what makes people who they are. With particular interest in how people take the hand they’ve been dealt—fate, family, circumstance, luck—and craft a life for themselves, the authors celebrate the grit and gumption of these Texas originals. Introducing quirky characters and tenacious spirits, Holley’s stories seek out the personality of the small town while Brown’s photographs capture the essence of a changing landscape. Hometown Texas aims not to be nostalgic or sentimental but rather to show readers an unknown Texas—one that, while not vanishing, is certainly on the wane.

Organized into five topographical, geographic, and cultural sections—East, West, North, South, and Central—three dozen stories and more than eighty complementary images work to create a parallel narrative to reveal what Brown has described as the “collective, various, remarkably complex soul that makes Texas unique.”

Hometown Texas is an exploration across miles and cultures, of well-traveled roads and forgotten byways, deep into the heart of Texas.

In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio, is the culmination of urban historian David Johnson’s extensive research into the development of Texas’s oldest city. Beginning with San Antonio’s formation more than three hundred years ago, Johnson lays out the factors that drove the largely uneven and unplanned distribution of resources and amenities and analyzes the demographics that transformed the city from a frontier settlement into a diverse and complex modern metropolis.

Following the shift from military interests to more diverse industries and punctuated by evocative descriptions and historical quotations, this urban biography reveals how city mayors balanced constituents’ push for amenities with the pull of business interests such as tourism and the military. Deep dives into city archives fuel the story and round out portraits of Sam Maverick, Henry B. Gonzales, Lila Cockrell, and other political figures.

Johnson reveals the interplay of business interests, economic attractiveness, and political goals that spurred San Antonio’s historic tenacity and continuing growth and highlights individual agendas that influenced its development. He focuses on the crucial link between urban development and booster coalitions, outlining how politicians and business owners everywhere work side by side, although not necessarily together, to shape the future of any metropolitan area, including geographical disparities. Three photo galleries illustrate boosterism’s impact on San Antonio’s public and private space and highlight its tangible results.

In the Loop recounts each stage of San Antonio’s economic development with logic and care, building a rich story to contextualize our understanding of the current state of the city and our notions of how an American city can form.

To create the "Confluence of Civilizations" mural commissioned for the 1968 World's Fair in San Antonio, Texas, Juan O'Gorman collected natural stones from all over Mexico—twelve colors in all—field stones that the artist knew would never fade or change their hue. Juan O'Gorman: A Confluence of Civilizations follows the life of Juan O'Gorman and covers the creation of this spectacular piece of midcentury public art that stands the test of time not just in vibrancy but as one of the most influential works created by a storied Mexican artist.

Juan O'Gorman was a not only a painter and a muralist, a mosaic artist, a critic, and a professor, but he was also an architect and a revolutionary; possibly most famous for his close friendship with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and as designer of their infamous two-house studio in Mexico City—Casa Azul—linked by a symbolic bridge.

To celebrate San Antonio's "HemisFair" Exposition in 1968, Juan created the giant mosaic mural that still adorns one wall of the Lila Cockrell Theater along San Antonio's famed River Walk. The design plans for the five ton mosaic measured 2600 square feet and consisted of 540 numbered panels, each weighting about 90 pounds.

Re-edited, reformatted, thoroughly annotated, with new illustrations and, at last, an index, these memoirs are in a hardcover edition worthy of this classic, first published in 1921. As the young wife of Samuel A. Maverick, a Yale-educated landholder whose name has entered the English language, Mary Adams Maverick came to Texas less than two years after the fall of the Alamo. She records her unique eyewitness views of the tumultuous decades that followed, as she raises a family in the shadow of Indian raids, invasions and deadly diseases.

Despite the image of a “Solid South,” many southerners stayed loyal to the Union during the Civil War and coexisted uneasily with their Confederate neighbors. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the Lewises gave “no cause of offense” but did not hide their beliefs, made clear to Stonewall Jackson as he made their home his headquarters. One family member, a delegate who refused to sign the Secession Ordinance, ran an iron furnace that kept dozens of Loyalists out of the Confederate Army.

In Ranch Gates of the Southwest, Daniel Olsen and Henk van Assen present more than 100 full-color photographs of ranch gates taken across Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. From rugged and functional to stylized and adorned, ranches with names such as F. V. Cuahope Ranch, High Lonesome, Felix River Ranch, and Rancho Quatro Hermanas reveal cultural history, landscape features, and individualism through language and design. Lucy R. Lippard’s introduction offers historical and cultural context of ranches and their gates. Landscape architecture professor Kenneth I. Helphand explains the environmental history of ranches from land appropriation and naming to the impact of gates on the landscape. In their own essays, Olsen and van Assen tell the behind-the-scenes story of making the book and describe type design and language from their perspectives as designers and photographers. Ranch Gates of the Southwestis both a sumptuous documentary record and a tribute to a quintessentially American symbol.

On Sept. 27, 1865, the San Antonio Express-News made its debut. And from the beginning, there was plenty to write about. The Civil War had just concluded, and it was only twenty-nine years after the fall of the Alamo. The Chisholm Trail, the high road of the Cattle Kingdom, began in San Antonio, which was the largest and among the most diverse cities in Texas. Spanish, German, and English were commonly spoken. The politics were lively and sometimes divisive, as the city was full of Unionist sympathizers in a state that was an anchor of the Confederacy. Today, 150 years later, San Antonio is America’s fastest-growing big city and still making history. San Antonio is a richly illustrated compilation of more than 150 years of coverage on the history and culture of the city, as told in the pages of the San Antonio Express-News. From local politics to news stories on the military, energy, water use, the border and immigration that reverberate nationally and internationally, to the recent naming of San Antonio’s five Spanish missions as a World Heritage site, the city has always been a place where the American identity is forged. This book tracks the city's past from 1865 until 2015 and is full of evocative pictures and compelling accounts culled from the Express-News archives.

The collection celebrates companies that shaped the city, such as Frost Bank, which began extending credit in 1867; the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, founders in 1869 of what is now the Christus Santa Rosa Health System and subsequently their namesake university; and H-E-B grocery. This is not a standard civic history or a straightforward march through the decades. Loosely organized by theme, the stories in the collection are often quite often surprising, just like San Antonio itself. As anyone who has spent time in the city knows, this is a place with a soul.

Three hundred years ago San Antonio was founded as a strategic outpost of presidios and missions on the edge of northern New Spain, imposing Spanish political and religious principles on this contested, often hostile region. The city’s many Catholic missions bear architectural witness to the time of their founding, but few have walked these sites without wondering who once lived there and what they saw, valued, and thought.

San Antonio 1718 presents a wealth of art that depicts a rich blending of sometimes conflicted cultures -- explorers, colonialists, and indigenous Native Americans -- and places the city’s founding in context. The book is organized into three sections, accompanied by five discussions by internationally recognized scholars with expertise in key aspects of eighteenth-century northern New Spain. The first section, “People and Places,” features art depicting the lives of ordinary people. Such art is rare since most painting and sculpture from this period was made in service to the church, the crown, or wealthy families. They provide compelling insight into how those living in the Spanish Colonies viewed gender, social organization, ethnicity, occupation, dress, home and workplace furnishings, and architecture. Since portraiture was the most popular genre of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Mexican painting, the second section, “Cycle of Life,” includes a selection of individual and family portraits representing people during different stages of life. The third and largest section is devoted to the church.

Throughout the colonial period, Catholic evangelization of New Spain went hand in hand with military, economic, and political expansion. All the major religious orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and the Augustinians—played significant roles in proselytizing indigenous populations of northern New Spain, establishing monasteries and convents to support these efforts.

In San Antonio 1718, more than 100 portraits, landscapes, religious paintings, and devotional and secular objects reveal the visual culture that reflected and supported this region’s evolving world view, signaling how New Spain saw itself, its vast colonial and religious ambitions, in an age prior to the emergence of an independent Mexico and, subsequently, the state of Texas.

Flamboyant hues and a bold mixed-media style make for a stunning visual tribute to the city of San Antonio. Quotes and captions accompany over 80 color reproductions of paintings by W. B. Thompson, whose influences include Vincent van Gogh and fauvist Raoul Dufy. San Antonio's loveliest attractions are portrayed, including the old Catholic missions, cobblestone lined Paseo del Rio, and the Governor's Palace, labeled "the most beautiful building in San Antonio" by National Geographic. Renditions of a local rodeo and a taqueria on the historic West Side assure that the full flavors and authenticity of this laid-back city come through. An appendix provides additional background on each painting.

This elegant coffee-table volume displays more than 100 color photographs by architectural photographer Mike Osborne, providing a distinctive contemporary portrait of the five mission complexes, now partly restored, partly still in ruins. One, better known as the Alamo, is a memorial to its defenders in 1836. The four others comprise San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Each section begins with a dramatic 19th-century image. Osborne’s color photographs range from interior views of the Alamo to a mariachi mass at San José to a composite of rifle portholes in Espada’s bastion, with other dramatic views of the missions and related landmarks in between.

From the Memorial Day Miracle to coach Gregg Popovich's legendary leadership to winning five NBA championships, the San Antonio Spurs have brought excitement to the Alamo City and the greater NBA family since 1976. As the team with the most rabid and loyal fan base in basketball history, Spurs Nation captures the unforgettable plays and crucial junctures in thirty years of playing hoops. Spurs Nation is THE collectible book for Spurs fans filled with silver and black and moments. This full-color photography, hardcover collection encompasses three decades of the Spurs including favorite past and current players from George Gervin to Tim Duncan, as seen through the eyes and words of the sportswriters and photographers who've covered their monumental rise for the San Antonio Express-News.

Texas, Being: A State of Poems collects more than forty-five poems from a beautiful and brutal state. Some are about the music of their languages. Some speak to the dead, some to the sun, and others to omissions of history. One concerns a hedgehog cactus, and another a roller rink. From “Happy, Texas” to “Palestine, TX,” from seashores to skeletons to Selena, all are in one way or another about Texas, but good poems are always about more than one thing.

Selected by Jenny Browne, 2017 poet laureate of Texas, these poems draw a picture of one of America’s vastly sublime yet most audaciously independent corners. In these diverse voices, the state is a lovely and painful contradiction of space and meaning. Texas is a place “where blind catfish cruise” and wild asters grow. It’s a frame of mind where Jenny Boully writes “the history is unending” and Mexican American studies professor Christopher Carmona can “feel the slowness of time.” Jorge Luis Borges wrote of it as “an endless plain / Where a man’s cry dies a lonely death.” Victoria Chang writes that “there is so / much sky that even birds / get lost."

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson describes her hometown as a “fiercely loving city tougher on the outside / but smooth as pecan shells,” and Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us to “be patient, sure there’s lots of bad around, / but more room for good too, with all this empty.” Whether it is Joshua Edwards imagining his photographer father or Primo Feliciano Marín’s declaration “Hail Texas, fraught with charms unknown,” these voices, past and present, give us a glimpse into the poetic soul of the nation’s most willful state.

Poets include Robert A. Ayres, Curtis Bauer, Jan Beatty, Layla Benitez-James, Jorge Luis Borges, Jenny Boully, Catherine Bowman, Susan Briante, Bobby Byrd, Christopher Carmona, Aline B. Carter, Rosemary Catacalos, Victoria Chang, Hayan Charara, Joshua Edwards, Tarfia Faizullah, Carrie Fountain, Vievee Francis, Mag Gabbert, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Lucy Griffith, Aaron Hand, Fady Joudah, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Emma Lazarus, J. Estanislao Lopez, Primo Feliciano Marín, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Walter McDonald, Jasminne Mendez, Townsend Miller, Ange Mlinko, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shin Yu Pai, Cecily Parks, Emmy Pérez, Octavio Quintanilla, Iliana Rocha, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, ire’ne lara silva, Jeff Sirkin, Margo Tamez, Lao Yang, Loretta Diane Walker, Emily Winakur, and Matthew Zapruder.

The Kronkosky Foundation Story provides a broad review of the twenty-five-year history of the Albert and Bessie Mae Kronkosky Charitable Foundation. Albert and Bessie Mae Kronkosky were committed to creating a legacy of “profound good” through charitable giving across four Texas counties that were dear to their hearts. The private foundation, formed in 1995 with a mission focused on health and human services (especially for children and the elderly), arts, and culture, has had a significant impact on San Antonio and the surrounding area.

The book recounts the Kronkosky family’s history and how they came into the wealth that eventually led to the foundation’s creation. The nonprofit organization’s story is one of exemplary management and wide-ranging positive impact on a community, and an examination of how local giving has changed in recent decades.

The Kronkosky Charitable Foundation exists in perpetuity, and their story stands as a testament to philanthropic commitment to a community.

Trinity University: Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future showcases the stories, moments, and people of the Trinity community’s 150-year journey. From its beginnings in a lone building in Tehuacana to its roots today in the heart of San Antonio, Trinity’s story is one of resilience, ambition, and success. Founded with the vision to create a new university of the highest order, Trinity’s commitment to innovative learning and enterprise have transformed challenge into opportunity and shaped the university into the esteemed private liberal arts and sciences institution it is today.

Early entrepreneurs such as the Munger brothers and Marrs McLean paved the way for the current entrepreneurship program and Stumberg competitions. Forward-thinking programs such as the Office of Experiential Learning, the Student Success Center, and the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching also supplement Trinity’s twenty-five academic departments. Trinity University reflects on all these stories and documents the institution’s vision for what a liberal arts education can become.