Michael A. Rustin

From historic Dallas streets and vanished downtown buildings to Deep Ellum blues, Texas landscapes, the Alamo, old neighborhoods, and mid-century city life, visual history books offer a way to experience the past without reading a traditional textbook from cover to cover. That is what makes a good historical coffee table book different. It combines photography, archival images, maps, architecture, artwork, and short historical explanations in a format that is enjoyable to browse and...

Picture Dallas without glass skyscrapers, multilane freeways, sprawling shopping centers, or the modern skyline familiar today. Travel back approximately 100 years from 2026, and you arrive in Dallas around 1926—a fast-growing Texas city filled with streetcars, brick storefronts, railroad activity, early automobiles, downtown department stores, theaters, neighborhood businesses, and streets that looked remarkably different from modern Dallas. The city's population had reached 158,976 by 1920...

Dallas in the 1950s was a city moving quickly into a new era. Population growth, suburban development, automobiles, new businesses, modern office buildings, aviation, and emerging technology were changing the way people lived and worked. At the same time, much of daily life still revolved around familiar places such as downtown Dallas, Fair Park, neighborhood shopping districts, local theaters, churches, schools, and the State Fair of Texas. The decade was also more complicated than the...