Sam Houston State University is no longer the simple "college on 
the hill," as it was known to the young men and women who first 
attended 125 years ago. Today it is a Carnegie Doctoral/Research 
Intensive Institution offering 135 undergraduate, graduate, and 
post-graduate programs. What began in 1879 as a "normal" school 
awarding diplomas to aspiring teachers grew into a degree-granting 
institution by 1919. Since then, 92,700 students have earned their 
Sam Houston degrees. Of those, nearly 57,000 are currently 
productive professionals enriching the working and cultural 
environment of every state in our nation and beyond. More than 
13,400 students from every corner of Texas to thirty-five 
countries around the world currently claim this scenic Huntsville 
campus of hills and pines as their academic home. Yet, Sam 
Houston's beginnings as a training school, whose singular mission 
was to prepare teachers for the state's public classrooms, belie 
the major university that grew out of its humble origins.

    In lively prose Sam Houston State University traces the school's 
development alongside the life of the campus. Through the 
description of the many fads, traditions, crises, and milestones 
that marked the ages, a distinct institutional identity emerges in 
this volume that will be at once both strangely fascinating and 
warmly familiar to those who have walked the campus as students, 
professors, staff, or visitors. This oversized, well-illustrated book 
presents a grand and colorful sweep of Sam Houston's 125-year 
history and will certainly occupy a prominent place in the homes 
and offices of all those who have been impacted by its warmth, 
accessibility, and purpose. 

_________________________________________________________

TY CASHION is an award winning author and a professor of history 
at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. He received a Ph.D. 
from Texas Christian University in 1993. Texas Monthly included 
Cashion in a short list of "a new breed of scholars" who are 
"changing the way contemporary Texans look at their state."  He is 
an occasional contributor to such newspapers as the Houston 
Chronicle and speaks regularly to civic groups on topics related to 
Texas and American Western history. Cashion's Texas Frontier 
(University of Oklahoma Press) won the Rupert Richardson Award in 
1996 for "Best Book on Texas and Western History."  His Pigskin 
Pulpit: A Social History of Texas High School Coaches (Texas State 
Historical Association, 1998) made several bestseller lists. He also 
co-edited a series of biographies with Frank de la Teja titled The 
Human Tradition in Texas.