Runner-up, Runner-up, Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction—Contemporary, Western Writers Of America, 2001
The Galveston storm of 1900 reduced a cosmopolitan and economically vibrant city to a wreckage-strewn wasteland where survivors struggled without shelter, power, potable water, or even the means to summon help. At least 6,000 of the city's 38,000 residents died in the hurricane. Many observers predicted that Galveston would never recover and urged that the island be abandoned. Instead, the citizens of Galveston seized the opportunity, not just to rebuild, but to reinvent the city in a thoughtful, intentional way that reformed its government, gave women a larger role in its public life, and made it less vulnerable to future storms and flooding. This extensively illustrated history tells the full story of the 1900 Storm and its long-term effects. The authors draw on survivors' accounts to vividly recreate the storm and its aftermath. They describe the work of local relief agencies, aided by Clara Barton and the American Red Cross, and show how their short-term efforts grew into lasting reforms. At the same time, the authors reveal that not all Galvestonians benefited from the city's rebirth, as African Americans found themselves increasingly shut out from civic participation by Jim Crow segregation laws. As the centennial of the 1900 Storm prompts remembrance and reassessment, this complete account will be essential and fascinating reading for all who seek to understand Galveston's destruction and rebirth.

Galveston and the 1900 Storm

History

Bixel, Patricia Bellis

Turner, Elizabeth Hayes

Americas

University of Texas Press

New in paperback with a new preface “Bixel’s research is thorough and her writing style is engaging. This book will be of interest to both maritime historians and historic preservationists. . . . a welcome addition to the growing literature on Texas maritime history.”-Southwestern Historical Quarterly “ . . . a heartening story, well-illustrated with photos.”-Houston Chronicle “Her story is beautifully told in words and pictures . . .”-Austin American-Statesman “ . . . recommended both as an outstanding book-to-remember-her-by and as a surprisingly complete account of a quirky aspect of maritime history.”-Review of Texas Books “This richly illustrated and authentic account of the ship’s long career is fully worthy of its subject, and makes a heartlifting good read.”-Sea History

Sailing Ship Elissa (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University)

Texas A&M University Press

New in paperback with a new preface “Bixel’s research is thorough and her writing style is engaging. This book will be of interest to both maritime historians and historic preservationists. . . . a welcome addition to the growing literature on Texas maritime history.”-Southwestern Historical Quarterly “ . . . a heartening story, well-illustrated with photos.”-Houston Chronicle “Her story is beautifully told in words and pictures . . .”-Austin American-Statesman “ . . . recommended both as an outstanding book-to-remember-her-by and as a surprisingly complete account of a quirky aspect of maritime history.”-Review of Texas Books “This richly illustrated and authentic account of the ship’s long career is fully worthy of its subject, and makes a heartlifting good read.”-Sea History

Sailing Ship Elissa (Volume 76) (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University)

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) established a reputation as one of the early twentieth century's foremost authorities on the history of African American slavery and the Old South. An empiricist, Phillips approached his subjects analytically and dispassionately, and his scholarship shaped historical investigation of the South for decades. Phillips was an empiricist and based his writing on an array of primary sources, including a growing collection of photographs he accumulated during his research. These images of plantation crops and machinery, agricultural scenes, distinctive architecture, white southerners, and former slaves and their descendants collectively record much about the life and labor in the rural South three decades before the Farm Security Administration undertook its own documentary projects during the New Deal.  In Seeing the New South, photography historian Patricia Bixel and Phillips scholar and historian John David Smith delve into the visual record Phillips left behind, publishing many of these photographs for the first time and integrating his photographic archive with his research and teachings on the history of the South. For example, his Life and Labor in the Old South, published in 1929, was well illustrated with useful photographs. The bulk of Phillips's papers resides in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. The collection includes sixty lantern slides and many photographic prints that Phillips employed in his work. Bixel and Smith uncovered another five hundred images that greatly expanded Phillips's visual archive. Taken between 1904 and 1930, these images provide glimpses of a Southern landscape rarely seen and even more rarely photographed, offering a striking visual account of early-twentieth-century life in the rural South.  Phillips deliberately sought out images of buildings and agricultural scenes emblematic of the South, representative portraits of white and black southerners, and distinctive depictions of farm and town life. Some photographs reinforce Phillips's arguments about the general backwardness of an impoverished rural South and about the limitations of the region's agricultural and industrial economies. But his images also documented active independent black and white communities with diverse economic practices and subcultures. This first-ever collection of Phillips's photographs provides dramatic documentation of economic and social life during an era seldom captured on film, yielding striking visual portraits of human dignity in black and white.

Seeing the New South: Race and Place in the Photographs of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

Arts & Photography

Smith, John David

Photography & Video

University of South Carolina Press

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Books by Bixel, Patricia Bellis