Trinity University Press

Introductory text in this handsome coffee table book accompanies compelling historic South Texas images, from cowboys to firewood vendors to the imprisoned Geronimo to Mrs. Favre’s piano class enjoying a picnic.

A host of previously unpublished photographs and a wealth of new information bring together the story of a region’s transition from horses, oxen and mules to bicycles and then horseless carriages, transforming the way people move around. Also shown is the evolution of streetcars, fire engines, buses and trucks.

Horseless carriages came to the Alamo City in 1899, though they took a little practice. Following a series of mishaps, in 1910 the city council set speed limits at 8 miles an hour within a mile of San Fernando Cathedral and 15 miles an hour beyond. Also told of are the struggles to drive to places like Kerrville and Corpus Christi and soon to the rest of the nation, first on a rugged highway known as the Old Spanish Trail that became the general route of Interstate 10.

Translated from German by Regina Beckmann Hurst and Dr. Walter Kamphoefner, professor of history at Texas A&M, these letters vividly describe the author’s odyssey from Germany to New York in 1848 and on to Wisconsin and, finally, to Texas, where he established and expanded what became a major milling company.

As the nation undertook the business of winning two world wars, tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen went through San Antonio bases. The picture postcards that they sent home uniquely document military life in these memorable years. One chapter of images eals with the Pershing Expedition’s chase—supplied from San Antonio—of Pancho Villa on the Mexican border.

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.

Thirty years after its founding in 1876, Fort Sam Houston was the nation’s largest Army post. Generals Pershing and Eisenhower were among hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed there. Fort Sam hosted the first military aircraft flights in Texas, supplied pursuit of Pancho Villa on the Mexican border and trained divisions in both world wars. Its 3,000 acres hold some 800 registered historic structures, more than the number at West Point. Now undergoing major expansion, it is the Army’s center for medical training and headquarters for commands including Fifth U.S. Army and U.S. Army South.

Here is the ultimate San Antonio sports reference handbook, tracing big-league sports since the city’s first baseball team in 1888. The text includes narratives of major and minor league baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey teams and boxers. There are rosters, scoring records, top honors and a wealth of other data, including Babe Ruth’s memorable home run in League Park.

Along with the movement Humans of New York, a project to share the stories of New Yorkers, Humans of San Antonio is part of the Global Humans Project, a network of major cities around the world dedicated to capturing a glimpse into the lives of everyday citizens. From Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro, San Antonio joins the ranks of cities photographed and shown through social media to the rest of the world.

Michael Cirlos is the photojournalist behind Humans of San Antonio, a social media project founded in 2012 that combines photography and storytelling to promote the spirit of San Antonio's growing downtown community. The book Humans of San Antonio is the culmination of more than four years of photographs highlighting the people, culture, and vibrancy of San Antonio. As a community that has weathered economic imbalance and proven itself a leader in urban redevelopment and twenty-first-century innovation, San Antonio embraces change while continuing to celebrate the diversity, history, and individuality that makes it unique. This book reflects the the city's heart and its melting pot of cultures. Through images and his subjects' own stories, Cirlos communicates not just vulnerability to fear, sadness, and anger but also resilience, strength, hope, tolerance, and perseverance. Humans of San Antonio is uniquely individual as a photography collection while celebrating the international collaborative that forms its roots.

Fiesta San Antonio began in 1891 began as a parade in honor of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto and has evolved into an annual Mardi Gras-like festival attended by four million with more than 100 cultural events raising money for nonprofit organizations in San Antonio, Texas. At Fiesta's start, the events were socially exclusive, one of the most prominent being the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo, a lavish, debutante pageant crowning a queen of the festival. Cornyation was created in 1951 by members of San Antonio's theater community as a satire, mocking the elite with their own flamboyant duchesses, empresses, and queens, accompanied by men in drag and local political figures in outrageous costume. The stage show quickly transformed into a controversial parody of local and national politics and culture.

Told through more than one hundred photographs and dozens of interviews, Cornyation is the first history of this major Fiesta San Antonio event, tracing how it has become one of Texas’s iconic and longest-running LGBT celebrations, and one of the Southwest's first large-scale fundraisers for HIV-AIDS research, raising more than two million dollars since 1990.

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.

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.

Tex-Mex, barbecue, and chili are important aspects of a culinary culture in Texas that has developed organically over many years of trial and error by thousands of remarkable cooks on both sides of the border. Tex-Mex cuisine, a melding of regional American and interior Mexican, has become enormously popular not just in the Lone Star State but nationwide and, increasingly, throughout the world.

In Classic Tex-Mex Cooking, the book that Texas Monthly called "the 101 on Texas’s superlative cookin’," chef and Southwest food expert Jim Peyton carefully selects nearly one hundred of the cuisine's outstanding dishes and treats them comprehensively, simplifying each technique and recipe. From the basics of the Mexican table like pico de gallo and guacamole to fused dishes like tacos, fajitas, enchiladas, chili, and barbecue, the melding of Texas fire-cooked culture with Mexico's vast medley of flavors has never tasted so good.

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.

Braiding strands of earthen insight with uproarious storytelling, Texas Hill Country legendary author Becky Patterson recreates the history of the Steiler Hill Ranch in twenty-four anecdotal chapters interspersed with original artwork. The result is a mixture of memoir and montage, treasure chest and tableau vivant of a world that’s beautiful, brash, and wonderfully heartbreaking. Patterson -- the daughter of Texas folk hero and self-proclaimed mayor of Luckenbach, Hondo Crouch -- has big shoes to fill and she does so successfully in this colorful collection of Hill Country and Texas ranch vignettes.

Foreman and general cowboy guru Raymond Kuhlmann tells stories of the Goat King and German drinking songs, the buzzard traps and Mexican corridos that filled the nighttime pastures. First-person accounts and vivid historical narratives evoke the ranch’s past, overlaid with Patterson’s breathless personal histories of afternoons spent rescuing a doe in a nightgown, or saving a porcupine from a pack of dogs.

This is a book that will connect you to whatever patch of earth you hold dear. It is poignant reminder of the landscapes we’ve forgotten to keep close, of the land that does not belong to us but simply is who we are. The Ranch That Was Us is an affectionate reminder to go outside and touch the earth that is you.