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Official Texas Ranger Bicentennial™ Publication Newly rich in oil money, and all the trouble it could buy, Texas in the years following World War I underwent momentous changes—and those changes propelled the transformation of the state's storied Rangers. Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler explore this important but relatively neglected period in the Texas Rangers'history in this book, a sequel to their award-winning The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910–1920. In a Texas awash in booze and oil in the Prohibition years, the Rangers found themselves riding herd on gamblers and bootleggers, but also tasked with everything from catching murderers to preventing circus performances on Sunday. The Texas Rangers in Transition takes up the Rangers'story at a time of political turmoil, as the largely rural state was rapidly becoming urban. At the same time, law enforcement was facing an epidemic of bank robberies, an increase in organized crime, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition enforcement—new challenges that the Rangers met by transitioning from gunfighters to criminal investigators. Steeped in tradition, reluctant to change, the agency was reduced to its nadir in the depths of the Depression, the victim of slashed appropriations, an antagonistic governor, and mediocre personnel. Harris and Sadler document the further and final change that followed when, in 1935, the Texas Rangers were moved from the governor's control to the newly created Department of Public Safety. This proved a watershed in the Rangers'history, marking their transformation into a modern law enforcement agency, the elite investigative force that they remain to this day.

On June 18, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson called up virtually the entire army National Guard, some 150,000 men, to meet an armed threat to the United States: border raids covertly sponsored by a Mexican government in the throes of revolution. The Great Call-Up tells for the first time the complete story of this unprecedented deployment and its significance in the history of the National Guard, World War I, and U.S.-Mexico relations. Often confused with the regular-army operation against Pancho Villa and overshadowed by the U.S. entry into World War I, the great call-up is finally given due treatment here by two premier authorities on the history of the Southwest border. Marshaling evidence drawn from newspapers, state archives, reports to Congress, and War Department documents, Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler trace the call-up's state-based deployment from San Antonio and Corpus Christi, along the Texas and Arizona borders, to California. Along the way, they tell the story of this mass mobilization by examining each unit as it was called up by state, considering its composition, missions, and internal politics. Through this period of intensive training, the Guard became a truly cohesive national, then international, force. Some units would even go directly from U.S. border service to the battlefields of World War I France, remaining overseas until 1919. Balancing sweeping change over time with a keen eye for detail, The Great Call-Up unveils a little-known yet vital chapter in American military history.

The most powerful black American of his time, this book captures him at his zenith and reveals his complex personality.