Publishers Weekly
05/02/2022
Historian Haynes (Unfinished Revolution) delivers an eye-opening if somewhat exaggerated revisionist history of the Texas revolution. Debunking myths and adding depth to the “familiar Texas story,” Haynes claims that before the Alamo, Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett was “famous simply for being famous.” Elsewhere, Haynes briskly recounts Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna’s 1836 defeat of the Alamo’s defenders—including Crockett, frontiersman Jim Bowie, and lawyer William Barret Travis—and pursuit of Sam Houston’s ragtag army of Anglo-Texans across southeast Texas. In Lynchburg, near the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River, Houston finally decided “to stand and fight,” scoring a lopsided victory that forced Santa Anna to recognize Texas independence. Throughout, Haynes convincingly chips away at nearly 200 years of hagiography that has elevated the role of white settlers in shaping Texas. He details how the displacement of the Cherokee and other eastern tribes affected Plains tribes, and delves into the role slavery played in colonial and republican Texas, though his claim that the Texas revolution was spurred in part by Anglo fears that the Mexican government would emancipate enslaved people in the Texian colonies overstates the available evidence. Still, this is a robust reconsideration of a crucial turning point in American history. (May)
From the Publisher
A powerful counternarrative to the traditional foundational myths about the defense of the Alamo and the origins of Texas…Haynes’s riveting tale of the state’s violent, intolerant, color-coded history reverberates in the radical politics of today’s increasingly radical Texas Republican Party.”—Foreign Affairs
“Cinematic prose…Haynes’ work offers a critical history of Texas, delivered like a collection of incisive and colourful campfire yarns.”—Irish Times
Historian Haynes’ history of early Texas goes beyond the usual focus on battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto, widening his scope to include all who lived in or emigrated to Texas...He illuminates the lives of Mexican settlers, African American freemen, and enslaved people."—Booklist
“A much-needed exploration of the complex racial history of early Texas.”—Kirkus
“Eye opening...Haynes convincingly chips away at nearly 200 years of hagiography that has elevated the role of white settlers in shaping Texas...this is a robust reconsideration of a crucial turning point in American history.”—Publishers Weekly
"[A] deeply researched, gracefully written, and thoughtfully argued masterpiece." —Southwestern Historical Quarterly
“[A] gripping story, with multiple complicated protagonists, and a framework that makes Mexican, indigenous, and black protagonists key to the origin of Texas.” —Texas Books in Review
"In Unsettled Land, Sam W. Haynes rescues the history of the Texas Revolution from romantic nationalism. He offers, instead, a gripping tragedy where a violent regime of racial exploitation supplanted an earlier experiment in multi-ethnic coexistence. Filled with vivid characters and dramatic plot twists, Unsettled Land reads like a nonfiction novel rich in insights about our present and past."—Alan Taylor, author of American Republics
"This brisk narrative illuminates the messy business of settlement, war, and independence in a multiracial borderland, and provides the most compelling history of Texas's founding in generations. Unsettled Land proves that no one knows the history of nineteenth-century Texas better than Sam W. Haynes."
—Amy S. Greenberg, author of Lady First
“History is always messy, yet the first half of the nineteenth century in Texas is especially so. Sam W. Haynes does a remarkable job conveying the conflicting visions of the numerous groups who fought over a land that elicited the best and worst in all of them. And he does it with an artful touch, drawing narrative order out of the historical chaos.” —H.W. Brands, author of Our First Civil War
"No chapter in American history calls more for a thorough re-telling than the origins of Texas. In the vividly written Unsettled Land, Sam W. Haynes meets that challenge, and his story is vastly more revealing than the tired myths that have held the stage for so long. Once one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse areas on the continent, Texas underwent a steady narrowing of possibilities until by the war with Mexico it was saddled with an iron Anglo rule that shoved to the margins the Native peoples, Hispanos, Blacks, and others who had played so prominently in its early years. It is a fascinating, if dispiriting, story."
—Elliott West, University of Arkansas
“Sam W. Haynes widens dramatically our angle of view beyond the canonical figures Travis, Crockett, and Bowie and in the process offers a thrilling, fresh, and deeply human narrative of early Texas. What a compelling read!"—Andrés Reséndez, author of The Other Slavery
"This is the book we desperately need on the Texas Revolution. Unsettled Land shows Texas as it was, not as it has appeared on the set of The Alamo. Haynes’ Texas was a multiracial society, where free African Americans became prominent merchants, and where white land speculators staged revolts with Indigenous allies. For the likes of Sam Houston and Stephen Austin, the Texas Revolution promised freedom from Mexican rule. But for the Indigenous peoples and African Americans who had forged lives in Mexican-era Texas, independence signaled a loss of freedom. With gripping prose, Haynes captures both the drama and the complexity of the Mexican province that would eventually become the Lone Star State."—Alice L. Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom
Kirkus Reviews
2022-02-11
A study of Texas history that shows how the era of revolution was a contest of many sides.
Wresting Texas away from Mexico wasn’t just the work of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. Haynes, director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, opens with a party of German freethinkers recruited by an Englishman in New York with the promise of free land—but not forewarned that the Comanches had designs on that land themselves. Then came a wave of eastern woodland Native peoples who had been driven out of their homelands by White settlement, guided by a canny leader who, though refused permission to colonize, did so anyway. They faced down Comanches along with many other neighbors. “The Indian refugees who came to Texas from the United States,” writes Haynes, “would find an even more diverse collection of Native peoples already living there.” Then came Anglo fortune-seekers and settlers, such as a Mississippi speculator who, “following in the footsteps of Stephen F. Austin, had been working for more than a year to establish his colony in the Piney Woods.” That colony put him up against Native peoples, the Hispanos of the town of Nacogdoches, and a nest of ruffians who had fled from Louisiana when the U.S. Army established an outpost there. All these parties came into conflict during the revolutionary era, and in the end, as Haynes documents, it was the pro-slavery Whites who initiated their revolution after learning that Mexico was abolishing slavery who emerged victorious. The effects of newly established White supremacy were many, including the removal of many Tejanos, Hispanic Texans who had joined in that revolution, from positions of authority or power. One was the guerrilla fighter Juan Seguín, driven from the mayorship of San Antonio in 1842. As Haynes notes, sharply, “Anglos dominated the city council; 140 years would pass before the town elected a Mexican-American mayor again.”
A much-needed exploration of the complex racial history of early Texas that won’t please the remember-the-Alamo crowd.
