Rosser Newton of Dallas

This is a working library kept by one reader. Rosser Newton has spent a career of more than 35 years around energy companies and their boards, and for most of that time he has also been reading nineteenth century Texas in the original: letters, convention proceedings, county records, old newspapers. The two habits turn out to be close relatives. Both reward the person who reads the document in front of him instead of the summary someone wrote about it.

The site is built in three layers. The first is the person, set out plainly on the page about Rosser Coke Newton with his background, his books and his civic work. The second is fifty five essays in his own voice, grouped into five subjects: energy capital, where he writes about outside money and the boards that come with it; Reconstruction Texas, the decade that produced the governor he wrote a book about; Dallas history, his own city read through its railroads, fairs and banks; the archive, which is about the records themselves; and county courthouses, the buildings where so much of that record was made and kept.

The third layer is the reference, twenty seven entries written the way an encyclopedia writes, each one with numbered sources on authoritative outside sites. It covers the people, places, institutions and documents the essays keep returning to. A reader who arrives with a name, a date or a building can start there. The natural first stop is the entry on Governor Richard Coke, because his life is where the history side of this work began.

His three books are listed with their publishers, and the press page gathers the coverage and recognition the biography received. Nothing on this site asks for anything. There is no form, no newsletter and no offer; the writing is the whole point.