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The end of the last decade also featured a wonderful work in Latinx history: Cynthia E. Orozco's No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. The first fully comprehensive study of the origins of the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) and its precursors, it shows how the organization incorporated race, class, gender, and citizenship to create bold new understandings of a pivotal period of activism. Ten years later, Cynthia E. Orozco's newest book, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist, is publishing January 10, 2020.
To close the current decade, we have gathered the best-selling trade and scholarly titles from the last ten years below. Here's to the next decade of excellent reading and research!
The Decade's Bestselling Books
2010
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2011
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Drawing on a wealth of oral histories from pioneering Chicana activists, as well as the vibrant print culture through which they articulated their agenda and built community, Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement presents the first full-scale investigation of the social and political factors that led to the development of Chicana feminism. Maylei Blackwell also co-edited a newer volume, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, alongside Dionne Espinoza and María Eugenia Cotera. This groundbreaking anthology brings together generations of Chicana scholars and activists to offer the first wide-ranging account of women’s organizing, activism, and leadership in the Chicano Movement.
2012
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The first book in our series The Katrina Bookshelf, Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, edited by Lynn Weber and Lori Peek, reached readers with a moving ethnographic account of Hurricane Katrina survivors rebuilding their lives away from the Gulf Coast. The Katrina Bookshelf is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. Supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, the Katrina Bookshelf is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature.
2013
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Former president George W. Bush temporarily brought down our website in 2013 after sharing his Chief White House Photographer Eric Draper's book Front Row Seat on his Facebook page. Our website had never before had so many visitors at one time! An extraordinary collection of images, many never before published, Front Row Seat presents a compelling, behind-the-scenes view of the entire presidency of George W. Bush, from dramatic events such as 9/11 to relaxed, intimate moments within the Bush family.
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Another book with roots in Texas politics to make a splash in 2013 was historian James L. Haley's The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986. Haley, the award-winning author of Sam Houston, Passionate Nation, and Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, offers a lively narrative of Texas’s highest court and how it helped to shape the Lone Star State during its first 150 years. H. W. Brands, whose history haikus will be published in 2020, called The Texas Supreme Court “important and entertaining—a potent combination!”
2014
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In 2014, the Ransom Center featured their Gone With The Wind holdings from the David O. Selznick archive in a major exhibition to celebrate the film's seventy-fifth anniversary. In the book The Making of Gone With The Wind, Steve Wilson collects more than 600 rarely seen items from the David O. Selznick archive—including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, restored costumes, and Selznick’s infamous memos. The volume offers fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic movie.
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2015
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In 2015, we published Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by musician and author Kristin Hersh, founding member of the bands Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. A haunting ode to a lost friend, this memoir by the acclaimed author of Rat Girl offers the most personal, empathetic look at the creative genius and often-tormented life of singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt that is ever likely to be written. NPR's Michael Schaub called the book "not only one of the best books of the year, [but] one of the most beautiful rock memoirs ever written.”
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2016
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2017
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Created across thirteen years, forty-eight states, and eighty thousand miles, photographer Jack Spencer's This Land: An American Portrait is a startlingly fresh photographic portrait of the American landscape that shares artistic affinities with the works of such American masters as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Mark Rothko, and Albert Bierstadt. Jarred by the 9/11 attacks, Spencer set out in 2003 “in hopes of making a few ‘sketches’ of America in order to gain some clarity on what it meant to be living in this nation at this moment in time.” The result is a vast, encompassing portrait of the American landscape that is both contemporary and timeless.
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Frank Denius was not yet twenty-one when he fought his way across Europe and was awarded four Silver Stars, a Presidential Unit Citation, and two Purple Hearts. His autobiography On the Way: My Life and Times describes Denius’s formative experiences during World War II in gripping detail and will cause any reader to wonder how he or she might have held up under similar pressure.
2018
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A New York Times Editor's Choice, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, by award-winning author Geoff Dyer, features one hundred essays about one hundred photographs, including previously unpublished color work, by renowned street photographer Garry Winogrand.
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Expansively researched and illustrated, Adam Arenson's lively history Banking on Beauty recounts how the extraordinary partnership of financier Howard Ahmanson and artist Millard Sheets produced outstanding mid-century modern architecture and art for Home Savings and Loan.
2019
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And finally, the year we are bidding adieu to is 2019, which brought the absolute treasure of Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. Hanif's third book rose as high as #8 on the New York Times bestseller list, earning some of the most gorgeous book reviews we've ever read. The book was named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, the A.V. Club, CBC Books, and the Rumpus, and was chosen as Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week. Go Ahead in the Rain received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist and was called "warm, immediate and intensely personal" by the New York Times.
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The late Norman D. Brown's Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929–1932, edited and with an introduction by Rachel Ozanne, is a deeply researched sequel to Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug, published in 1984. In Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys, a master storyteller of Texas politics brings to life pivotal moments of backroom wrangling, economic crashes, and aftershocks still felt nearly a century later. Taking readers to an era when a self-serving group of Texas politicians operated in a system that was closed to anyone outside of the state’s white, wealthy upper echelons, Brown unearths riveting, little-known stories whose impacts continue to ripple today at the Capitol.
