San Antonio College Library

This first part of the film follows Jack Johnson's remarkable journey from his humble beginnings in Galveston, Texas, to his entry into the world of professional boxing, where, in turn-of-the-century Jim Crow America, the heavyweight championship was an exclusively "white title." In 1908 Johnson became the first African-American to earn the title Heavyweight Champion of the World. On July 4, 1910, ex-champion Jim Jeffries, the new "Great White Hope,"...

Unofficial biography, beginning with his Missouri boyhood and progressing to his West Point career, his Apache and Sioux-chasing days, his military campaigns, and leadership of the A.E.F.

Prizewinning biographer Geoffrey C. Ward brings to life the real Jack Johnson, a figure far more complex and compelling than the newspaper headlines he inspired could ever convey. Johnson battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks and in 1908 won the greatest prize in American sports--one that had always been the private preserve of white boxers. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and...

The focus of this book is the Expedition, the Villistas, and their leader Francisco Pancho Villa. Villa's early life witnessed the advent of the typewriter, the telephone, linotype, the automobile, the Kodak camera, the first motion pictures, wireless telegraphy, the airplane, and the radio. In the days before his defeat at Columbus and the subsequent routing of his bands by the Punitive Expedition, Villa had a coterie of journalists wherever he traveled,...