Spencer G Russell

The Cursed Shakespeare Play is More Cursed as a Movie on a Shoestring BudgetA converted screenplay about what happens when an ambitious novice director, Diane, takes a small army of volunteers to a secluded island mansion to film her version of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.At first, it seems like j...

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historica...

This book will walk you through the Julia language. First it will use examples to show off different sides of Julia: writing a simple, fast simulation; plotting data; and defining a new numeric type and associated arithmetic operators. The rest of the chapters will each focus on a specific part of J...

For the Plains Indians, the period from 1750 to 1890, often referred to as the traditional period, was an evolutionary time. Horses and firearms, trade goods, shifting migration patterns, disease pandemics, and other events associated with extensive European contact led to a peak of Plains Indian in...

The Texas Left. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron.For most of the twentieth century, the popular perception of Texas politics has been that of dominant conservatism, punctuated by images of cowboys, oil barons, and party bosses intent on preserving a decidedly capitalist status quo.In fact, p...

Escalante Canyon is a red-walled hole in a geologic uplift (the Uncompahgre Plateau) in western Colorado. Pioneers surging west fell into this canyon hole the way gold nuggets get caught in the potholes of a stream. Like nuggets eddying against stone, they were shaped by the Canyon—rounded off, shat...

In The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism, some of our most accomplished and readable historians push the origins of present-day Texas conservatism back to the decade preceding the twentieth century. They illuminate the initial factors that began moving Texas to the far right, ...

Where more poignantly than in a small country graveyard can a traveler fathom the flow of history and tradition? During the past twenty years, Terry G. Jordan has traveled the back roads and hidden trails of rural Texas in search of such cemeteries. With camera in hand, he has visited more than one ...