Texas Book In A Bag

This is the story of Enid Collins, the famed handbag designer of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The setting is Spring Valley Ranch, the 400 acres of rugged but beautiful land that she and husband Frederic Collins bought sight unseen in order to pursue a dream of ranching - a dream that wasn't to be. Instead, out of their need to survive, they did what they knew how to do, they made things.In many ways, their remote and rugged lives were far from ours today. In other ways, they were not that different. They succeeded, they struggled, they lived. We begin as spectators watching from a distance but through this story we are beckoned closer - to see what they saw and, indeed, read their journaled thoughts.Through this human story you are invited to examine your own life, to question. You are invited to a place of deeper meaning and purpose.

The good, the bad, the ugly.

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.