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Despite their self-proclaimed reputation as the "greatest gamblers" and the fiercest of free-enterprise capitalists, Edward W. Constant II argues that oilmen in Texas quickly evolved a closely-knit fraternity defined by an altruistic, cooperative moral economy. Yet what oilmen did, what they owned, how they used it, and how they thought about it was transmuted in practice and transformed in law by the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated and robust petroleum engineering science. Although savage in their criticism of and opposition to any form of "regulation" or government meddling, since the early 1930s the oil fraternity has thrived and prospered mightily in one of the most highly regulated businesses in the United States. But this regulation, by the Railroad Commission of Texas (itself part and parcel of the oil fraternity), was fraternal self-regulation: however fraught, it was both science-based and protective of the oil fraternity and its moral economy. This book explores the origin, character, and path-dependent coevolution of these seemingly paradoxical features and offers an alternative--moral economy--to orthodox, purely egoistic-incentive based accounts of economic behavior.

The Edge Rover chronicles the expansive life of Isaac Slover, a fur trapper who was born in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War and who ranged throughout the early American West. The variety and extensiveness of Slover's encounters among Indigenous peoples and the Hispanic Southwest distinguish his experience from that of other "mountain men" of his time. A lifespan from 1777 to 1854 meant that Isaac Slover saw a transformed America, and he endured through frequently shifting borders, particularly in what became the young country's southwest region. Among his numerous adventures are a youth consumed by the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania, then later farming in Kentucky, trapping and trading in New Mexico, and finally making his way to Southern California. Throughout, Slover sifted between cultures, jumped across borders, navigated conflict, and hid along the margins of history. Sparse evidence documents Slover's adventures, but what remains is meticulously compiled here for the first time by Timothy E. Green, who grew up with fireside tales of the mountain man's exploits. At any given stage of his life, Isaac Slover can be situated at a critical juncture in the history of the West, roving beyond the edges and back again. The Edge Rover is therefore a welcome addition to early American West biographies, showing that boundaries, borders, and identities during this early period could be as fluid and wild as the land itself.

While mainstream Vietnamese history chronicles a few woman warriors of the past and some contemporary female activists, Vietnamese women always have performed their roles in the quiet shadows of men. To illuminate those shadows, Quan Manh Ha and Quynh H. Vo have brought into English the first anthology of its kind, featuring twenty-two contemporary stories written by Vietnamese women whose narratives make visible the multitudinous lives of Vietnamese women over the last two decades. All the stories in Longings appear in English for the first time, inviting new readers to appreciate the "Longings" or aspirations of Vietnamese women as they have had to face suffering and struggle, hope and despair, sorrow and joy, while navigating an uncharted course through the social and economic waves that have lifted or lowered their lives since the US-Vietnam normalization in the mid-1990s. The wife in Da Ngan's "The Innermost Feelings of White Pillows" suppresses sexual frustration at her husband's impotence by stuffing her pillows with new fibers. The rural women in Tran Thuy Mai's "Green Plums" have no choice but to become prostitutes to earn a living. The mother in Pham Thi Phong Diep's "Mother and Son" demonstrates an unconditional sacrifice and ineffable love for her adopted son despite his insolence and ingratitude. A woman in Nguyen Thi Chau Giang's "Late Moon" violates all prescribed gender norms in order to live freely. Longings brings together stories by both well-established and emerging Vietnamese writers, those who come from various regions in Vietnam and represent the diversity and richness in Vietnamese short fiction. This anthology expands the audience for deserving authors and broadens perspective on the heterogeneous voices, narrative styles, and thematic interests of women who contribute to the growing corpus of contemporary Vietnamese short fiction.

The inaugural winner of the Sowell Emerging Writers Prize, essays exploring humans' relationship to the natural world.

Breaking a thirty-year silence, B¿o Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam's foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers B¿o Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà N¿i at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time. Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of B¿o Ninh's stories. Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen's unfulfilled wishes. Hà N¿i at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.

Leesa Ross did not expect to write a book. Neither did she expect the tragedy that her family endured, a horrific and sudden death that led her to write At Close Range. Her debut memoir is the story of what happened after her son Jon died in a freak gun accident at a party. Ross unsparingly shares the complexities of grief as it ripples through the generations of her family, then chronicles how the loss of Jon has sparked a new life for her as a prominent advocate for gun safety. Before the accident, Ross never had a motivation to consider the role that guns played in her life. Now, she revisits ways in which guns became a part of everyday life for her three sons and their friends. Ross's attitude towards guns is thorny. She has collectors and hunters in her family. To balance her advocacy, she joined both Moms Demand Action and the NRA. Through At Close Range, the national conversation about gun control plays out in one family's catalyzing moment and its aftermath. However, At Close Range ultimately shows one mother's effort to create meaning from tragedy and find a universally reasonable position and focal point: gun safety and responsible ownership.

Through a fictional extinction of bees, explores the interconnectedness between human and non-human species through the lens of language

On Monday, December 4, 1967, a body was discovered in the science building of the largest university in West Texas. The next day, citizens of Lubbock gathered for the Carol of Lights, and event typically the centerpiece of the holidays for the quiet college town. But in 1967, the normal festive excitement and anticipation was shockingly and swiftly shattered by the harrowing events that had occurred just twenty-four hours earlier. For the first time, the story of this shocking murder has been painstakingly reconstructed by Alan Burton and Chuck Lanehart. Piecing together timelines based on interviews, journalists' archives, courtroom transcripts, and the personal experiences of Lubbockites, Fatal Exam situates the murder, relates the capture, and details the trial of the crime's perpetrator. Not your standard psychopathic master, the criminal at this story's center cuts a challenging profile, and his story shines an unusual light on the criminal justice system. Fatal Exam is a crime story, but it's also the story of its biggest university in West Texas and the peculiar town-and-gown relationship that comes in such a far-flung setting.

What if the harbinger of our greener future was a small power plant set in the middle of nowhere in West Texas? Longtime alternative energy executive Andy Bowman's book makes exactly this case, outlining what he suggests is a more sustainable future for American capitalism. Newly revised and updated for 2023, The West Texas Power Plant that Saved the World, offers the Barilla solar plant in Pecos County as a test case for the state of renewable energy in the twenty-first century United States. Bowman explains the climate science that necessitated this shift and makes business-based arguments for what the future should look like. The result is a book that tells a personal story of West Texan innovation, gumption and vision, while outlining how our society needs to work in partnership with all stakeholders to confront climate change.

What lies beneath the ground? Our poor eyesight cannot penetrate even an inch into the soil, so for centuries, fortune-seekers have tried every way imaginable to see below the surface. Whether searching for mineral veins, groundwater, or buried treasure, people have looked for ways to avoid the plodding and backbreaking process of digging. They have followed dreams, seers, dowsing rods, and advice from the spirit world. When petroleum became an item of commerce, oil-hunters took to all these methods. Many built homemade inventions called doodlebugs, which they said could detect underground oil. It took a while, but science finally came up with its own toolbox of oil-finding methods in the early twentieth century. Finding oil is still expensive and risky, however. The old ways? They are mostly gone, but a few oil-dowsers still stride across fields with rod or pendulum, and no doubt people still consult dreams and psychics. And don't pretend that you yourself haven't wondered if that dowser might be onto something, or if that famous psychic can really tell where there is oil, or if that inventor stumbled onto a better way to detect underground oil. Of course you have. History is written by the victors, and scientists won over the oil industry--rightly so. But their accounts give short shrift to the rich history of less traditional ways to find oil. Although ignored, the records of nonscientific methods and their contributions to the oil business are well worthy of study. Lacking in science, they are rich in humanity. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . wait, scratch that . . .these things are still going on. Join us in a visit to a place where dreams, seers, and spooks are taken seriously, where forked twigs dip toward oil pools and homemade oil-finding gizmos blink or beep with the promise of riches tucked just below the surface of the known world.