Search results for ""Author Lewis F. Fisher""

By definition, a maverick is a “lone dissenter” who “takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates” or “a person pursuing rebellious, even potentially disruptive policies or ideas.” The word maverick has evolved in the English language from being the term for an unbranded stray calf to a label given to a nontraditional person to a more extreme “uncontrollable individualist, iconoclast, unstable nonconformist.” The word has grown into an adjective (“he made a maverick decision”) and become a verb (mavericking or mavericked). Of all the words that originated in the Old West and survive to the present day, author Lewis Fisher notes, maverick has been called the least understood and most corrupted. But where did the word come from?The word’s definition is still such a mystery that Merriam-Webster lists it in the top 10 percent of its most-looked-up words. All of the origin stories agree it had something to do with Samuel A. Maverick and his cattle, but from there things go amok rather quickly. Was Sam Maverick a cattle thief? A legendary nonconformist who broke the code of the West by refusing to brand his calves? A Texas rancher who believed branding cattle was cruelty to animals? A runaway from South Carolina who branded all the wild cattle he could find and ended up with more cattle than anyone else in Texas?Samuel A. Maverick was a notable landholder and public figure in his own time, but his latter-day fame is based on the legend that he was a cattle rancher. No amount of truth-telling about maverick seems to have slowed the tall tales surrounding the word’s origination. Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend is a whodunit, a historical telling of the man who unwittingly inspired the term, the family it’s derived from, the cowboys who embraced it as an adjective meaning rakish and independent, the curious inquirers intrigued by its narrative, and the appropriators who have borrowed it for political fame.Texas historian (and secondhand Maverick by marriage) Lewis Fisher has combed through Maverick family papers along with cultural memorabilia and university collections to get at the heart of the truth behind the far-flung Maverick legends. Maverick follows the history of the word through the “Maverick gene” all the way to Hollywood and uncovers the mysteries that shadow one of our country’s iconic words. Taken as a whole, the book is a fascinating portrayal of how we form, use, and change our language in the course of everyday life, and of the Maverick family’s ongoing relationship to its own contributions, all seen through the lens of a story featuring cowboys, Texas Longhorns, rustlers, promoters, movie stars, athletes, novelists, lawyers, mayors, congressmen, and senators—to say nothing of named maverick brands ranging from Ford cars and air-to-ground missiles to computer operating systems, Vermont maple syrup, and Australian wines. Ironically, given its literal meaning as unbranded, maverick is a brand name that helped shape the history of the American West and represents the ideal of being true to oneself.

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This coffee table book displays more than 100 rarely seen images to bring to life the frontier era of one of America’s most unusual cities, seen through its Spanish plazas. Colorful iconic paintings and drawings mix with 19th century photographic stereoviews and cabinet cards, cropped for impact and appearing with their original subtle tonings.As San Antonio’s frontier era was ending in the 1870s and 1880s, Military Plaza by day was a vivid outdoor market. By night it was a crowded dining venue where storied chili queens dished out spicy meals while saloons and fandango halls pulsed nearby. A cathedral dating from 1738 faced Main Plaza, where Apache chieftains and Spaniards once buried a hatchet, a lance, six arrows and a horse to signify peace. On Alamo Plaza, a demonstration of how barbed wire constrained a herd of cattle changed the course of the American West.Its plazas were the heart of San Antonio since its earliest days on the remote northern frontier of New Spain. Not long after a railroad—in 1877—at last provided easy access to the rest of the nation, rapid growth made San Antonio start looking more like cities elsewhere. Chili Queens, Hay Wagons and Fandangos allows us to picture the earlier, more colorful time. Illustrations are accompanied by descriptive captions and a concise narrative.

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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.

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Few American cities enjoy the likes of San Antonio's visual links with its dramatic past. The Alamo and four other Spanish missions, recently marked as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are the most obvious but there are a host of landmarks and folkways that have survived over the course of nearly three centuries that still lend San Antonio an "odd and antiquated foreignness." Adding to the charm of the nation's seventh largest city is the San Antonio River, saved to become a winding linear park through the heart of downtown and beyond and a world model for sensitive urban development. San Antonio's heritage has not been preserved by accident. The wrecking balls and headlong development that accompanied progress in nineteenth-century San Antonio roused an indigenous historic preservation movement--the first west of the Mississippi River to become effective. Its thrust has increased since the mid-1920s with the pioneering work of the San Antonio Conservation Society. In Saving San Antonio, Texas historian Lewis Fisher peels back the myths surrounding more than a century of preservation triumphs and failures to reveal a lively mosaic that portrays the saving of San Antonio's cultural and architectural soul. The process, entertaining in the telling, has reverberated throughout the United States and provided significant lessons for the built environments and economies of cities everywhere.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This concise and lavishly illustrated account balances the significant history of the San Antonio’s missions’ founding and their original function with the stories of their subsequent decay and eventual restoration. New drawings depict all five mission compounds as they first appeared. Built in the eighteenth century by Franciscan friars and Native American converts, San Antonio’s five missions form the largest such cluster in the United States. One is preserved as the Alamo, the others make up San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.

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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."

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Thirty-five classic stories fill this book about San Antonio’s seamier side, from the days of the Old West when Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson came by, Rowdy Joe Lowe ran a saloon on Main Plaza and Butch Cassidy got away from Madame Fanny Porter’s in time to escape the fate of fellow train robber Deaf Charley, who found himself at the business end of a lawman’s six-shooter. A map of the 22-block red-light district west of San Pedro Creek shows more than 100 houses of ill repute, inhabitants listed.

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