Texas Destiny

Texas Destiny
Author: Lorraine Heath
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2010-11-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062046608

He’s fallen for a woman . . . Anxious to meet her soon-to-be husband, Dallas Leigh, for the first time, mail-order bride Amelia Carson is en route to Fort Worth, Texas. When she steps off the train and locks eyes with her betrothed, she immediately feels drawn to him. But the cowboy standing before her isn’t Dallas. Instead, Dallas’s brother Houston has been sent to accompany her on the three-week journey to the ranch where she’ll begin her new life. Who belongs to another . . . The war Houston Leigh fought has left him with visible scars, a daily reminder of his cowardice on the battlefield. Denying his intense attraction to Amelia, he is determined to deliver her untouched, as promised. But during their long dangerous trip, he can’t help but admire her inner strength and fearlessness. And when she looks at him—as if she can see beyond his scarred face and read his innermost thoughts—he loses his heart to her. Now as they near the ranch, Houston must choose to remain loyal to his brother—or find the courage to fight for the woman he’s convinced is his destiny . . .

Texas Glory

Texas Glory
Author: Lorraine Heath
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2010-11-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062046616

She never dreamed of the happiness . . . Cordelia McQueen is little more than a prisoner in her father’s house until he barters her off to a stranger in exchange for land and water rights. Now in a new place and married to a man as big and bold as untamed Texas, Cordelia prepares to live within her husband’s shadow and help him achieve his goals. Only he could promise her . . . Dallas has one driving ambition: to put West Texas on the map. Convinced he’s too harsh a man to be loved, he expects nothing except a son from his shy wife. But with each passing day, Dallas discovers a woman of immense hidden courage and fortitude. He is determined to give her his heart, even if it means letting her go to achieve her own dreams and find her own glory.

Her Abundant Joy (Texas: Star of Destiny, Book 3)

Her Abundant Joy (Texas: Star of Destiny, Book 3)
Author: Lyn Cote
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061997013

“A wonderfully satisfying finale to Lyn Cote’s fascinating saga of Texas history. Riveting, engaging, unpredictable….Not to be missed!” —Kathy Herman, author of the Phantom Hollow and Sophie Trace Trilogies Her Abundant Joy is the third and final book in the Texas: Star of Destiny series by Lyn Cote, a RITA Award-winning author in 2006 for Best Inspirational Romance. Following The Desires of Her Heart and Her Inheritance Forever, Her Abundant Joy is a heart-soaring story of love and faith as a beautiful German immigrant tries to escape her past and find peace in the arms of a Texas Ranger.

Her Inheritance Forever (Texas: Star of Destiny, Book 2)

Her Inheritance Forever (Texas: Star of Destiny, Book 2)
Author: Lyn Cote
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2009-08-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061939552

The second book in the Texas: Star of Destiny series by Lyn Cote, Her Inheritance Forever is an unforgettable story of faith, duty, destiny, and love that unites a proud Tejano lady and an American cowboy in a time of great upheaval in the West. A 2006 Rita Award finalist, author Lyn Cote demonstrates the great power and range of inspirational fiction in Her Inheritance Forever, as two hearts are joined and tested amid the historic events—including the legendary stand at the Alamo—that would ultimately lead to Texas statehood.

Mistress of Manifest Destiny

Mistress of Manifest Destiny
Author: Linda S. Hudson
Publisher: Texas State Historical Assn
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Jane McManus Storm Cazneau (1807-1878) was a complex person who died at sea the way she lived--at the center of a storm of controversy. Whether as Aaron Burr's mistress, land speculating in Texas, behind enemy lines during the Mexican War, filibustering for Cuba or Nicaragua, promoting Mexican revolution from a dugout in Eagle Pass, or urging free blacks to emigrate to the Dominican Republic, Cazneau seldom took the easy path. She foresaw a nation with equal rights for all in a world in which representative government was the norm rather than the exception. As a journalist, an advisor to national political figures, and publicist, she helped shape United States domestic and foreign policy from the mid-1840s into the 1870s. Cazneau's most unique contribution was as a staff writer for John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, where she described the mission of the United States as "Manifest Destiny," thereby coining one of the most significant and influential phrases in American political history. A single parent and working mother, Cazneau was not a women's rights woman who agitated for suffrage. She ridiculed the Seneca Falls housewives' complaints because real oppression existed for women in the factories, in the needle trades, on Indian reservations, and in the Caribbean. Cazneau advised working women to educate themselves and take better-paying men's clerical jobs. Although it appeared that her schemes and speculations failed, many of the policies she advocated eventually succeeded. She promoted the need for a steam navy and merchant marine fifty years before Alfred T. Mahan. She wrote about the problems of the working class sixty years before it became a Progressive crusade, advocated agrarian reform fifty years before Populists took up the cause, and assisted republican revolutionaries a hundred years before the United States awoke to the needs of the ordinary people in the sister republics of the Western Hemisphere. Cazneau's letters, books, journal, and newspaper articles leave little more than a hint of her intelligence and conversational wit, a mere suggestion of her sexuality and explosive temper, a glimpse of her courage and spirituality, and a trace of her sense of humor reflected in the sparkle of violet eyes beneath raven hair and a dark complexion that was her distinguishing trait. She was dedicated to the expansion of republican government; she had a special place in her heart for the abandoned and neglected, whether persons or animals; and she had a deep and abiding love for her country and faith in its people and in its future.

Star of Destiny

Star of Destiny
Author: Madge Thornall Roberts
Publisher: University of North Texas
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1993-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781574411478

As the great-great-granddaughter of Sam Houston and Margaret Lea, Madge Thornall Roberts played in her great-grandparents’ home in Independence, Texas, which had Santa Anna’s saddle in the upstairs hall, the San Jacinto sword over the mantle, and where she kept her doll’s clothes in an old chest of Margaret Lea’s. Trunks of documents sat unattended in the barn. Some of those papers later were burned, and what remained were divided among descendants. Madge Roberts has gathered these documents together again and, along with other Houston letters and interviews, woven them into the story of the Houstons’ marriage. Much is known about Sam Houston’s political and military career, but the influence of his wife and children on his life has been overlooked. The letters are astonishing in their emotional honesty, revealing a deep interdependency as well as a close and loving marital partnership.

Big Wonderful Thing

Big Wonderful Thing
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 944
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292759517

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

Blue Texas

Blue Texas
Author: Max Krochmal
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2016-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469626764

This book is about the other Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism. Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state's marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow. Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation's most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today.

Texas Legacy

Texas Legacy
Author: Lorraine Heath
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006285609X

For as long as he can remember, Rawley Cooper has loved Faith Leigh. But the cruelty of his childhood haunts him and he knows he’s undeserving of Faith. When she comes to him on the night of her nineteenth birthday, they both give into temptation. But the searing kiss reaffirms what he’s always known: he can’t have a lifetime of her in his arms. To protect his heart, he packs his things and heads west. Faith has always adored the boy her parents took in and raised. But she’s not certain she can ever forgive him for riding out of her life just when she needed him the most. When an urgent telegram forces him to return six years later, Rawley discovers Faith is now a woman to be reckoned with. As old feelings are stirred back to life and new passions take hold, they both must confront secrets from their past or risk losing a legacy of love.