Lone Star Research Articles

Paramilitary Provision of Adequate Disaster Response and Advancement of Public Health: The Case of the Texas State Guard and Operation Lone Star.

This article reports on State Defense Forces (SDFs) as tools for providing coordinated, disciplined, trained, and uniformed volunteers to augment civilian disaster response and advance public health. This report draws on and describes the example of the Texas State Guard's Medical Brigade and its Operation Lone Star. Although SDFs have downsides, since they are largely self-sufficient, they are far less expensive and burdensome yet nonetheless effective alternatives. Future avenues for further inquiry are suggested. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2017;11:412-416).

Cosmic phylogeny: reconstructing the chemical history of the solar neighbourhood with an evolutionary tree

Using 17 chemical elements as a proxy for stellar DNA, we present a full phylogenetic study of stars in the solar neighbourhood. This entails applying a clustering technique that is widely used in molecular biology to construct an evolutionary tree from which three branches emerge. These are interpreted as stellar populations which separate in age and kinematics and can be thus attributed to the thin disk, the thick disk, and an intermediate population of probable distinct origin. We further find six lone stars of intermediate age that could not be assigned to any population with enough statistical significance. Combining the ages of the stars with their position on the tree, we are able to quantify the mean rate of chemical enrichment of each of the populations, and thus show in a purely empirical way that the star formation rate in the thick disk is much higher than in the thin disk. We are also able to estimate the relative contribution of dynamical processes such as radial migration and disk heating to the distribution of chemical elements in the solar neighbourhood. Our method offers an alternative approach to chemical tagging methods with the advantage of visualising the behaviour of chemical elements in evolutionary trees. This offers a new way to search for `common ancestors' that can reveal the origin of solar neighbourhood stars.

Abstract WP307: Lone Star Stroke Consortium TeleStroke Registry (LESTER)

Background: The Lone Star Stroke Consortium TeleStroke Registry (LESTER) currently consisting of 3 academic hub centers and 25 partner spokes is a statewide initiative organized by UTHealth to understand practice patterns of acute stroke management via telemedicine (TM) in Texas, a state with one of the largest rural populations in the US. Methods: All presumed stroke patients for whom a TM consultation has been obtained in the network are entered into a web-based, HIPAA-compliant database from 9/2013 to 3/2016. 90-day mRS and disposition are obtained by a standard phone interview. Results: A total of 3390 TM consults were performed: 57.3% acute ischemic stroke (AIS); 8.6% TIA; 1.4% ICH; 32.3% non-stroke related diagnoses (Table). Half of the cases were < 65 years of age. Overall 38.3% of AIS cases received tPA and 12.5% of all cases were transferred to a hub. tPA rates varied from 19% to 50% and transfer rates varied from 0% to 37.5% among spokes with at least 10 AIS consults. Conclusions: In this statewide registry of telestroke organized by academic health centers, TM leads to substantially high rates of tPA administration for AIS cases compared with national treatment rates in the US. TM provided by academic centers also leads to low rates of transfer from spoke hospitals, suggesting improvement in allocation of healthcare resources.

Riding for the Lone Star: Frontier Cavalry and the Texas Way of War, 1822–1865 by Nathan A. Jennings

Reviewed by: Riding for the Lone Star: Frontier Cavalry and the Texas Way of War, 1822–1865 by Nathan A. Jennings Adam J. Pratt Riding for the Lone Star: Frontier Cavalry and the Texas Way of War, 1822–1865. By Nathan A. Jennings. American Military Studies. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. vi, 402. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-635-0.) Nathan A. Jennings's Riding for the Lone Star: Frontier Cavalry and the Texas Way of War, 1822–1865 tries to prove that, like the advertisement says, Texas is a whole other country. To do so, Jennings looks at what he calls the "Texas way of war," an interesting historiographical nod toward Russell F. Weigley's classic on U.S. war making, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973). Jennings explores the impact of horses on Texas's mode of fighting and argues that horse culture permeated Texan society from its earliest days as a Spanish colony. This horse culture also allowed Texans to develop a unique style of fighting. In that sense, then, the Texas way of war is a hybrid of multiple traditions, though Jennings emphasizes the Anglo-European heritage and downplays the significance of Native American traditions adopted by Texans. This book, though, is not a cultural history. It is military history, through and through—complete with twenty-first-century military jargon—that carefully explores military matters in Texas. National and then state leaders sought "a multi-faceted security posture" and "combined arms superiority" to protect their borders (pp. 72, 68). While such anachronistic phrases pepper the text and interrupt the flow of what is otherwise very readable prose, Jennings has written a thoughtfully organized and detailed account of warfare in early Texas. That detail can, at times, bog down a reader not as intimately familiar as the author with the location of certain blockhouses, forts, or other geographical features. Moreover, the narrative can obscure the larger points he tries to make about the emerging Texas way of war. After a very effective introduction, the succeeding chapters read more as a highlight reel of Texas military glory rather [End Page 418] than as a concerted effort to piece together an overarching interpretive framework to tie all the detail together. What comes across, though, is that by 1840 a distinct style of warfare had matured in Texas, and central to that maturation process was the reliance on the famed Texas Rangers. This force allowed for "economized defense," or national security on the cheap, and introduced a flexible response to Native American attacks and threats from Mexico (p. 154). During the U.S.-Mexican War, the "Diablos Tejanos" served American purposes but also lacked military discipline (p. 189). During the Civil War, Texas cavalry units fought in several southern armies across multiple theaters of the war. Though the combat record of Texas cavalry units varied, Jennings makes an interesting case for the existence—at least before the Civil War—of a distinctive Lone Star war-making tradition. Overall, Jennings has written an engaging and highly detailed account of Texas's military past. The author, though, could have clarified several analytical categories, including the use of the word polity, usually in reference to frontier residents. Readers may assume that Jennings is referring to white Texans, but he shows that the Rangers were a multiethnic outfit. If the military relied on diversity, it stands to reason that the frontier polity that it was trying to defend reflected that reality. Complicating our understanding of those frontier residents who constituted the polity could have made for an interesting discussion of the roles and responsibilities that Texas demanded of its citizens—even those who were not white. Focusing on the diversity of these communities would have allowed Jennings to connect his work to the rich historiography of the borderlands. Moreover, there is little discussion about how the Rangers were engaged in regulating Texas's growing slave population. Once again Jennings could have further grounded the Rangers in the social and cultural fabric of their homes. Last, in several instances Jennings remarks that Texans were waging a war on the outskirts...

Affecting Profundity

Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound. This article looks at the ways in which filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity, or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship provides a primary case study in the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence, however it is contended that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of different cinematic modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism in American revenge and “social cleansing” films, Ken Loach’s social realism, Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011), and John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) permits an exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension, as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The article concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from cognitive film theory

Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. ed. by Jesús F. de la Teja

Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. ed. by Jesús F. de la Teja

Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. ed. by Jesús F. de la Teja

Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas. ed. by Jesús F. de la Teja

From the Personal to the Political, Religious, and a Vision of Socialism in Maurice Gee’s Orchard Street, a New Zealand Novel for Children

This article considers Orchard Street, a novel for children by award-winning New Zealand author, Maurice Gee, and his use of history in depicting New Zealand during the 1951 conflict between the Waterside Workers, and the ship-owners and National government. The article focuses first on Gee’s childhood during the 1940s in Henderson, West Auckland, and on Newington Road where he and his family lived as a model for the creation of Orchard Street. It then looks at the integration of the 1951 conflict into this realistic setting, and Gee’s charging of the street with a political significance.
 A self-proclaimed socialist, Gee is firmly on the side of the Wharfies, as is his protagonist, the thirteen-year old Ossie Dye who is on the brink of adulthood, and faced with difficult choices. While supporting his parents’ socialist ideals, and delivering illegal propaganda at night, Ossie imagines he is the solitary American cowboy, Zane Grey’s Lone Star Ranger (p. 13), and excludes the lonely Bike Pike from his gang of friends.
 The article briefly examines Gee’s use of an older Ossie as the first person narrator who, looking back from 1991 to the 1951 conflict, forms a circular frame that modifies its depiction. Also considered is the influence of neo-liberalism and the social and political reforms of the 1980s-1990s on Gee’s writing. The article finally argues that the multi-layered timeframe and geometrical structure of the novel are evidence not only of the author’s preoccupation with division but, more predominantly, of his socialist ideology and search for wholeness and balance.

Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin John H. Matsui Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers. By Matthew J. Clavin. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. [x] 252. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-08822-1.) Although never explicitly referred to as such, Matthew J. Clavin's book is a significant contribution to borderlands history. If borderlands history once emphasized the frontiers of nations and empires, it now deals with, as Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett have written, "ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads, peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road" ("On Borderlands," Journal of American History, 98 [September 2011], 338). These words ring true for Florida, which was the site of imperial and racial conflict as well as cooperation between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans well before the United States annexed it. The conflict between Spanish and English colonists, American nationals, Native Americans, and Africans over land and slavery hardly ceased in 1821. [End Page 407] This work's ambitious claims extend further than the existing research on self-emancipated slaves warrants. While at least three hundred fugitives from American slavery ran to Pensacola in the four decades before the American Civil War, they represent the tip of the iceberg of selfemancipated Americans in those years. Recent studies of the American abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad reinforce this sense of scale. Manisha Sinha notes that historians today estimate some 150,000 African Americans freed themselves by running away between 1830 and 1860 (The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition [New Haven, 2016], 382). Eric Foner concurs, suggesting that 1,000 to 5,000 annually voted with their feet for freedom in those three decades (Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad [New York, 2015], 4). Yet scale is not everything. Spanish Florida was a colonial society with slaves, but it also contained free people of color who "benefited from the absence of the inflexible binary racial divide that characterized neighboring Anglo-American societies and the strictly ordered caste system that persisted throughout much of Spanish America" (p. 26). Indeed, not only were some black Floridians free, but also some were armed. Louisiana's Third Battalion—stationed in Pensacola after the American Revolution—included black soldiers who wore red coats left behind by the British, an irony not missed by American visitors. Over a hundred black and mixed-race men formed part of the Pensacola militia, a phenomenon absent from the southern United States outside of New Orleans. By the final years of Spanish rule a majority of Pensacola's nearly one thousand residents were black. By 1860 Florida was by far the smallest of the future Confederate states in a demographic sense, and when admitted to the Union a few months before Texas, it had barely a quarter of the Lone Star State's population. Florida's white population was a third as large as that of Arkansas, the next smallest rebel state. Considering Florida's peripheral status and long coastline, it was little surprise that the Confederacy expended few resources on the defense of the state or that the Union was able to maintain control of Fort Pickens near Pensacola. By May 1862, Confederate forces abandoned the Pensacola region due to manpower shortages and the demand for soldiers along the western front in Tennessee. Black Floridians quickly allied with Union soldiers who occupied Florida. This military backwater was governed by abolitionist generals. Underground Railroad conductor Neal Dow of New England arrived at Pensacola as a Union brigadier general and began recruiting and arming slaves. Other antislavery officers organized Sunday schools where black soldiers and children alike could learn to read. From its inception as a Spanish colony through the American Civil War years, Florida defied the racial norms set by the Spanish, British, and Americans due in part to its location at the intersection of those competing worlds. Clavin has given American and borderlands historians an excellent study of one underappreciated frontier...

The Material Culture of German Texans by Kenneth Hafertepe

Reviewed by: The Material Culture of German Texans by Kenneth Hafertepe Carter L. Hudgins The Material Culture of German Texans. By Kenneth Hafertepe. ( College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 516. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-382-0.) A book, even a small one, that explores the houses, or furniture, or churches, or cemeteries fashioned by any immigrant group in the South would make a welcome contribution to southern material culture studies. Kenneth Hafertepe has accomplished the decidedly more difficult task of writing a big book about the material culture expressions of nineteenth-century German immigrants scattered across a very large state. If Hafertepe had found that, after arriving, German immigrants in Texas attempted to replicate old-world ways only to eschew traditional practices for American ones, this book would be unremarkable. German immigrants in Texas, Hafertepe finds, did initially rely on traditional practices that they slowly relinquished, standing apart for a time from America's beguiling popular culture while they became a part of it. The cultural trajectory German immigrants followed in Texas was, however, much more complicated than that, the pace and character of cultural adaptation and change too lumpy to be explained quite so neatly. Hafertepe invites us to trace through house plans, cabinetmakers, grave markers, and turnvereins how German immigrants, themselves culturally and politically diverse, adapted to each other while they participated in intercultural borrowing among themselves and with Hispanic, Anglo American, and Creole Texans to lay the foundation for what he calls a "blended" material culture (p. 1). The Material Culture of German Texans is notable for its ambition, for the attention it draws to the role material things can play in the historical study of immigrant groups, and for its fresh investigation of a complicated cultural process. Cultural change in Texas reflected national trends—one reason this book is significant beyond what it reveals about Texas towns and farmsteads. In Texas, the decades between 1870 and 1890 were, according to Hafertepe, a period of experimentation in architectural forms and styles. A wider range of architectural expression reflected the penetration of industrially produced architectural elements as well as the influence of national architectural styles and the pattern books and catalogs that made them widely available. Choices made one at a time through this period, Hafertepe reminds us, were influenced not only by the dynamics of national fashions but also by cultural revivalism that followed the end of the Franco-Prussian War, by nostalgia, and by the dynamics of elastic connections between urban centers and the state's rural hinterlands. In an analysis that leans heavily on things, it is interesting that the sample of houses and places the author investigated is relatively small (the house sample appears to be 108) and that more than a few of the houses have been moved from their original locations. Much of the material culture evidence is housed in local [End Page 675] museum collections and heritage centers. While the curation of this evidence is a testament to the interests and energies of local historical organizations in retaining physical links to their pasts, these collections may play a disproportionate role in our understanding of this chapter of Texas history. That said, Hafertepe has assembled a convincing argument built from his own impressive field research and earlier scholarship. The primary audience for this book is surely history-minded Texans, but its wider audience may come to it with less familiarity with Texas places and geography. For these readers, maps of the counties, towns, and cities whose German residents figured in the cultural shifts that Hafertepe traces would help explain the role distance between urban centers and hinterlands played in whether old customs remained vibrant or declined. This book is important for the way it considers overlapping and coincident material culture expressions, house plans, building systems, grave markers, social halls, and furniture principal among them. Combined, this material evidence provides a powerful description of the German Texas landscape. Hafertepe builds along the way a convincing argument that the advent of antiGerman sentiment during World War I, and individual, community, and corporate adjustments to it, came as German distinctiveness was already waning in the Lone Star State's...

Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center by Katherine Jean Adams

Reviewed by: Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center by Katherine Jean Adams Carolyn Mazloomi Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center. By Katherine Jean Adams. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 322. Illustrations, notes, glossary, index.) Covering two centuries of history, Comfort and Glory is an impressive volume giving an in-depth look at 115 important and stunning quilts from the Winedale Quilt Collection at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. With meticulous handwork, intricate designs, and graphic histories, the collection demonstrates the impact of quilts on American culture and exemplifies the importance of this beloved art form to the scholarship of women's culture and quilt history. These are among the finest quilts in America. Reflecting the material culture of Texas, the collection encompasses a broad range of styles, including masterpieces as well as utilitarian quilts made for everyday use. Extraordinary quilts made by many well-known twentieth-century luminaries, such as Pine Hawkes Eisfeller, Bertha Stenge, Emma Andres, Florence Peto, and Dr. Jeannette Throckmorton, [End Page 252] anchor the collection. In fact, two quilts, "The Garden" and "Tree of Life," made by Eisfeller, are listed among the twentieth century's one hundred best American quilts. With few exceptions, each quilt has been extensively researched, yielding valuable historic details of the women who made them, their lives, families, and the religion and politics of the era. The book is beautifully illustrated with full-page color photographs and smaller color photographs of quilt details. The writing is exemplary; Katherine Adams is clearly a researcher familiar with quilts and accustomed to communicating complex details supported by solid footnotes. One of the most intriguing histories is that of the Lone Star quilt made in 1858 by Amanda Pairalee Hammonds (Linn) of Rusk County, Texas, when she was eighteen years old. After the Civil War, Amanda married George Linn, and the young couple traveled from East Texas to South America with all their possessions, including her quilt. Adams has done a superb job of researching and documenting the quilt's eighty-nine year journey between two continents and its eventual return to Texas, including a difficult voyage from New Orleans to Brazil. In a fierce tropical storm near the coast of Cuba, the ship wrecked, submerging the quilt in the ocean for days, but the Hammonds family dried it on the beach. Amanda's daughter donated the Lone Star quilt to the University of Texas, making it the university's first. Another Texas-made quilt, "Freedom to Dream" by Marie Anita Murphy of Kountze, Texas, was exhibited at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City in 1986, where I saw it. The quilt represented Texas in the Great American Quilt Contest and Festival, which celebrated the Statue of Liberty's centennial. In addition to a full-page color photograph of Murphy's quilt, Adams also includes is a full-page photograph of the original design schematic and fabric samples used to make the contest-winning quilt from California. Comfort and Glory is an exceptional book: wonderful images, solid research, exceptional writing, and handsome production make it most impressive. I highly recommend it to those interested in women's history as well as quilt studies and collecting. [End Page 253] Carolyn Mazloomi West Chester, Ohio Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority by John Williams

Reviewed by: The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authorityby John Williams T. Robert Hart The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority. By John Williams. River Books. ( College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 265. $36.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-341-7.) In 1934 the Texas legislature granted the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) the right to dam one of the Lone Star State's most deadly and unpredictable rivers in order to control, store, and use its water to generate electricity. For centuries, the Colorado River had alternated between drought and flood stages, and efforts to control it had failed. In 1900 the Austin Dam had been swept away before a crowd of spectators who had gathered to watch raging [End Page 738]waters that eventually caused millions of dollars in property damage. John Williams describes the next three decades as an "Era of Frustration," when politicians and businessmen, including utility magnate Samuel Insull, tried unsuccessfully to dam and develop the Colorado. The frustration ended with the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, growing public support for large dams, and the persistence of Congressmen James Paul Buchanan and Lyndon B. Johnson who advocated federal funding. By the end of World War II, the LCRA was selling power and expanding its customer base from towns to farms, and the people of rural Texas began to invest in modern appliances for the first time. These early days were marked by success and celebration, but they would be short-lived. For the next four decades the LCRA turned its attention to monitoring water quality, managing recreational activity on its famous Highland Lakes, and eventually shifting to natural gas, coal, and oil to produce electricity. The authority's challenges testified to the difficulty that comes with controlling nature. Williams tells this story with intimacy and with an authoritative voice in The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority. Relying largely on the LCRA corporate archives, Williams takes readers into the boardrooms and offices of the men who directed the power company's operations since the 1930s. The LCRA photographs he uses copiously throughout the book also bring to life the construction of the dams and capture the scale of the authority's development on the Colorado River. For former employees of the LCRA and for residents of Central Texas, this book should evoke vivid memories of Texas's reluctant embrace of modernization. Social and cultural historians will find Williams's account useful for its discussion of the LCRA's campaign to demonstrate the practicality of electricity for farmers and the emergence of recreational culture on the Highland Lakes. In these two sections especially, the author places this local project into a broader regional context. In other parts of the book, however, Williams dwells too long and too often on the administrative history of the LCRA, which will prove tedious for a general audience. This is a company history in the traditional sense—much of the narrative revolves around the policies and internal politics of various administrators—but it is thoroughly researched and offers a revealing look into the management of water and the production of energy in the twentieth century. T. Robert Hart University of North Carolina Wilmington Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi ed. by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell Debbie Cottrell Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Deborah M. Liles and Angela Boswell. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 336. Photographs, maps, notes, index.) Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi is an ambitious work that seeks to fill a gap in both Civil War and Texas history, while demonstrating both the similarities and differences between women in Texas and women in other parts of the South during the Civil War. The book represents another milestone in the maturation of southern women’s history and brings into focus the specific experiences of Texas women, putting them center stage whereas most other works, at best, have noted them in passing. It won the 2017 Liz Carpenter Award for the best book in Texas women’s history. Featuring a helpful introduction and eleven essays that are more contextual than biographical in nature, Women in Civil War Texas ties its broad subject matter together by focusing on the diversity of Texas women’s experiences in the 1860s. Some chapters consider public activities and writings of women, while others use race or politics as the lens to analyze [End Page 104] women’s lives. Unionist women are represented in chapters on German women and women in North Texas, by Judith Dykes-Hoffmann and Rebecca Sharpless, respectively, both written with insight and perspective that provide useful interpretations and reinforce the complex nature of Texas during the Civil War. The book’s final chapter, by Deborah Liles, adds to this sense, building on the frontier narrative and demonstrating the multiple layers of women’s lives during this time period. Liles shows how the Texas frontier was a world away from much of the war’s milieu, noting that in this part of the state, “women adapted out of necessity for survival, which had little to do with Victorian ideals and standards of living” (266). In a book rich with detail of women’s lives, Linda Hudson’s impressive analysis of Texas Supreme Court decisions that affected black women in the Civil War era is particularly insightful. Drawing on some 297 court decisions, Hudson demonstrates the changing nature of legal decisions for black women on issues ranging from freedom to divorce to murder. A more personal case study is Dorothy Ewing’s biographical piece on Caroline Sedberry, which shows how an ordinary woman responded to her husband’s long absence during the Civil War and the intertwined emotions of fear, confidence, and grief that she lived through as she ran the family’s Bosque County farm. Taken as a whole, Women in Civil War Texas successfully demonstrates how several factors made the experiences of Texas women during the Civil War different from women in other parts of the South. Sharing a border with Mexico and featuring a vast western frontier, Texas was the newest and least-settled state in the Confederacy. It was also the state most distant from most of the war’s military encounters. The bright side of being removed from the battlefields was offset by the complications of distance when family members entered the war; the less invasive presence of Union forces for Confederate women was more complicated for those women who supported the Union. Women in Civil War Texas is a welcome addition to southern women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history. Similar to other important recent works such as Jesús F. de la Teja’s Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance: Other Sides of Civil War Texas (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) and Catherine Clinton’s Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), this collection emphasizes the complexity of Civil War history and the important issues still deserving of historians’ attention. By putting Texas women at its center, it also demonstrates the diverse range of women’s experiences that deepen our understanding of this unsurpassed national conflict. [End Page 105] Debbie Cottrell Texas Lutheran University Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

Occurrence of Amblyomma americanum (Acari: Ixodidae) and Human Infection With Ehrlichia chaffeensis in Wisconsin, 2008-2015.

Because of the increasing incidence of human ehrlichiosis in Wisconsin, we assessed reports of human infections by Ehrlichia chaffeensis and the distribution of its vector, the lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum (L.)). From 2008 through 2015, 158 probable and confirmed human cases of E. chaffeensis infections were reported to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Five cases without travel history outside of Wisconsin were confirmed as E. chaffeensis by polymerase chain reaction. Surveillance for the vector occurred from 2008 through 2015 and was based on active and passive methods, including examination of white-tailed deer, collections from live-trapped small mammals, submissions of ticks removed from wild and domestic animals through the Wisconsin Surveillance of Animals for Ticks (SWAT) program, digital or physical submissions by the public to the University of Wisconsin Insect Diagnostic or Medical Entomology laboratories, and active tick dragging. More than 50 lone star ticks (46 adults, 6 nymphs, and 1 larva) were identified. Lone star ticks were more commonly found in south central Wisconsin, particularly in Dane County, where discovery of more than one life stage in a single year indicates possible establishment.

Single-Port Laparoscopic Solo Surgery: Technical Aspects and Personal Experience

Solo surgery is a practice in which a surgeon operates alone, without other surgical member’s assistance or cooperation, except for a scrub nurse and an anesthetist. Solo surgery at our institution is facilitated by several equipment, including Lone Star Retractor systems and a passive camera holder. The introduction of single-port laparoscopic surgery (SPLS) has dramatically increased the applicability of solo surgery, because SPLS reduces the number of surgical members participating in the surgery. A shortcoming of laparoscopic surgery is the indirect way of observing and manipulating. Solo surgery effectively eliminates this limitation by enabling operator-driven manipulation of the camera. Solo surgery is particularly advantageous in surgeries that are limited to a single quadrant, such as appendectomy, cholecystectomy, and herniorrhaphy, because they require less adjustment of the camera. However, its indications can be extended to include operations that involve multiple quadrants, such as various types of colectomies including total colectomy. In addition, solo open surgery can be performed with the aid of a larger retractor (i.e., the Bookwalter Retractor system). It appears that solo surgery can be performed by any surgeon who can perform SPLS competently and its indications can be extended, possibly after the development of supporting equipment.

‘Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain’: Using a Bibliometric Study to Identify Trends and Knowledge Gaps of Vector-borne Disease Research in Oklahoma

Abstract. Research on vector-borne diseases on the Great Plains has a rich and dynamic publication history. The aim of this study was to assess the publication trends in Oklahoma between 1965 and 2015 with a view to identifying knowledge gaps on which to focus future research initiatives. Using Web of Science (Thompson Reuters) and Pubmed (National Center for Biotechnology Information) in EndNote, a total of 747 publications was identified that involved Oklahoma-based researchers, samples, or data obtained since 1965. Eighty-two percent (n = 615) of the published studies focused on ticks and tick-borne diseases. Most of the studies involving specific tick species (n = 282) focused on the lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum (L.), (51.1%), with anaplasmosis the primary disease system studied. Until 1989, most vector-borne disease research focused on ecology and control. The trend shifted almost complementarily since the 1990s with as much as 80% of research focused on clinical- or laboratory-based studies....

Minimally Invasive Transanal Total Mesorectal Excision in Laparoscopic Coloanal Anastomosis for Ultradistal Rectal Cancer

Introduction: Transanal rectal excision and total mesorectal excision are challenging parts of laparoscopic coloanal anastomosis for ultradistal rectal cancers. The bottom-up transanal laparoscopic approach, a modification of the approach proposed for endorectal surgery,1 has demonstrated to allow for an adequate radical oncologic resection.2 The video shows how the transanal laparoscopic total mesorectal excision and coloanal anastomosis are performed on a 60-year-old man with a UT3N+ low rectal cancer.3 Materials and Methods: The anal canal is exposed using a Lone Star Retractor. The distal rectum is divided using a harmonic scalpel 1 cm above the dentate line, maintaining an adequate distance from the cancer, and is closed with a purse string. A single-incision laparoscopic trocar is inserted into the anal canal. Retropneumoperitoneum is insufflated at 12 mmHg. A 50-cm-long, 5-mm 30° camera, and two straight 5-mm laparoscopic instruments are used for the dissection. The rectum with its mesorectum is bluntly dissected circumferentially in an avascular plane from the presacral fascia, the prostate plan, and laterally, under laparoscopic view, following the rules of radical transanal total mesorectal excision (TME). The dissection is continued as far up as possible and allows for a complete dissection up to the level of upper rectum. Now the laparoscopic abdominal part of the operation is started. The inferior mesenteric vein is divided; the mesentery of the splenic flexure is dissected from the pancreas; the inferior mesenteric artery is divided at its origin; the splenic flexure is taken down. The upper rectum is mobilized and the plan of the transanal dissection is reached allowing for the complete detachment of the rectum and mesorectum and for the observation of the ultradistal part of the pelvis and of the transanal port. The specimen is extracted through a Pfannestiel incision. After reinsufflation of the pneumoperitoneum, the mobilized colon is transposed transanally through the single incision laparoscopic surgery port under laparoscopic vision and a standard hand-sewn coloanal anstomosis is made, protected by a loop ileostomy. Path report demonstrated a T3 N0 cancer with clear margins. Between March 2014 and November 2015, seven patients were operated with clear margins (range: 0.4 to 1.5 cm). Postoperative follow-up includes digital examination, CEA level, and abdominal and chest CT at close intervals. All patients are alive and disease free (follow-up 6 to 26 months). Conclusions: The video shows how the transanal minimally invasive approach allows for an oncologically radical TME under laparoscopic view and facilitates this challenging portion of the laparoscopic coloanal anastomosis for ultradistal rectal cancers, with minimal sphincter damage as demonstrated by preoperative and postoperative anorectal manometry. No competing financial interests exist. Runtime of video: 10 mins 3 secs Part of this video was presented at the 2015 ACS meeting in Chicago.

Lone Star State Hosts the Milton Society of America

Lone Star State Hosts the Milton Society of America

Use of a tick-borne disease manual increases accuracy of tick identification among primary care providers in Lyme disease endemic areas

Given the high incidence of tick bites and tick-borne diseases in the United States, it is important for primary care providers to recognize common ticks and the pathogens they may transmit. If a patient has removed and saved an attached tick, identifying the tick helps guide clinical management and determine whether antibiotic prophylaxis for Lyme disease is appropriate. To investigate providers’ ability to recognize common ticks and the pathogens they may transmit, we asked 76 primary care providers from Lyme disease endemic areas to identify the common name or genus of preserved ticks found in their area. At baseline, 10.5%, 46.1%, and 57.9% of participants correctly identified an adult female blacklegged tick (engorged), dog tick, and lone star tick, respectively. Less than half of participants identified the three pathogens most frequently transmitted by blacklegged ticks. Use of a reference manual with tick photographs and drawings substantially improved identification of ticks and associated pathogens and therefore should be encouraged in clinical practice.

“Reinventing” Higher Education: Symbolism, Sloganeering, and Subjectivity in the Lone Star State

The authors analyze public higher education policy in Texas during the current era of fiscal austerity in the state through Morgan’s (2006) images of organizations. Scarce resources have led to cuts in educational funding and a refocusing of faculty work using statistical methods designed to enhance the status of teaching over research. In the name of efficiency using “reinventing government” rhetoric, politically appointed Regents and their ideological proponents in the Texas Public Policy Foundation have made attempts to turn what is commonly thought of as a public good into a consumer one. Faculty and their supporters have resisted these initiatives. The authors employ Morgan’s (2006) images of organizations as political systems, cultures, and psychic prisons as modes of understanding the conflict and lack of consensus between these affected groups.