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Several hours before dawn on 5 August 1835, a Washington slave slipped into his mistress's bedroom, axe in hand. Anna Maria Thornton awoke to see a drunken Arthur, her longtime house slave and the son of her trusted cook and maid, Maria, threatening her with, she believed, murder. Luckily for Mrs. Thornton, Maria was in the room and, "being fortunately awake, seized him & got him out" while her mistress sounded the alarm to the neighbors. Shocked and horrified, Mrs. Thornton recorded in her diary the attack and Arthur's escape, subsequent capture, and criminal indictment (Thornton, Aug.—Oct. 1835). Some of Washington's less reputable citizens reacted with hate and violence. In the ensuing days, out-of-work white mechanics gathered at the steps of the city hall, looking for a scapegoat for the disorder Arthur represented. On 12 August the mob turned its wrath on the vulnerable free black community. The "Snow Storm," named for a victim of its destruction, free black Beverly Snow, was Washington's most infamous riot. The crowd burned Snow's restaurant, along with several other symbols of free black success (Werner 1986: 243–45; Curry 1981: 99–100).

Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives engages current scholarship on women in Texas, the South, and the United States. It provides insights into Texas's singular geographic position, bordering on the West and sharing a unique history with Mexico, while analyzing the ways in which Texas stories mirror a larger American narrative. The biographies and essays illustrate an uncommon diversity among Texas women, reflecting experiences ranging from those of dispossessed enslaved women to wealthy patrons of the arts. That history also captures the ways in which women's lives reflect both personal

Although the origins, application, and socio-historical implications of the Jim Crow system have been studied and debated for at least the last three-quarters of a century, nuanced understanding of this complex cultural construct is still evolving, according to Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, coeditors of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. Indeed, they suggest, scholars may profit from a careful examination of previous assumptions and conclusions along the lines suggested by the studies in this important new collection. Based on the March 2008 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington, this forty-third volume in the prestigious series undertakes a close review of both the history and the historiography of the Jim Crow South. The studies in this collection incorporate important perspectives that have developed during the past two decades among scholars interested in gender and politics, the culture of resistance, and "the hegemonic function of 'whiteness.'" By asking fresh questions and critically examining long-held beliefs, the new studies contained in The Folly of Jim Crow will, ironically, reinforce at least one of the key observations made in C. Vann Woodward's landmark 1955 study: In its idiosyncratic, contradictory, and multifaceted development and application, the career of Jim Crow was, indeed, strange. Further, as these studies demonstrate-and as alluded to in the title-it is folly to attempt to locate the genesis of the South's institutional racial segregation in any single event, era, or policy. "Instead," as W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in his introduction to the volume, "formal segregation evolved through an untidy process of experimentation and adaptation.".