San Antonio; A Historical and Pictorial Guide

xii, 308 pages. Illustrations. A Note on Sources. Index. Signed and dated by the author on the fep. Gift inscription, not from the author, also on the fep. Author and journalist Charles W. Ramsdell, Jr. (1909-1973) contributed articles to numerous publications and was a staff writer for the San Antonio Express Magazine . He published a highly-regarded guidebook to the city of San Antonio in 1959. Born on 1909 April 5 in Austin, Texas, author and journalist Charles W. Ramsdell, Jr. was the son of noted historian Charles W. Ramsdell (1877-1942) and Susanna Griffith Ramsdell. Through his mother, he was a descendant of Angelina Dickinson Griffith (1834-1869), who with her mother survived the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. Ramsdell attended the University of Texas and traveled extensively in Mexico before working as a historian for the National Park Service and as a translator for the Texas General Land Office. He translated a work by Alfonso Reyes, Mexico in a Nutshell , for publication in 1964. All the color, past and present, that has made San Antonio one of our most distinctive cities is faithfully distilled within the covers of this unusual guidebook. Charles Ramsdell skillfully traces the city's development from 1691, when San Antonio de Padua was merely a small Indian village, to the dramatic present.…