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Discover what role Texas played in helping the United States achieve its "Manifest Destiny" of stretching from coast to coast. As the only state to have been its own nation, Texas has a unique history. This book chronicles its journey from frontier province of Spain and Mexico to the Texas Republic and its current status as a U.S. state. Along the way, readers discover the fascinating people, places, and events that shaped the Lone Star State. Book jacket.
Few states have gone the route that Texas did to become part of the Union. First a part of Spain, then Mexico, Texas faced a very uncertain future when it opted to revolt against the regime of Santa Anna. On the plains of San Jacinto, a ragtag Texas army won immortality by defeating Santa Anna and gaining independence for Texas. The path to Texas statehood shines brightly with some of the memorable names in American history, such as Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Stephen F. Austin, William Barret Travis, and Andrew Jackson. That same path is also glorified by the legendary Battle of the Alamo, at which people died willingly in the defense of an idea they believed in. The route to Texas statehood is long, thrilling, sometimes desperate, and an overall triumph of the spirit of freedom.
In the spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union. This hard-fought and bitter controversy profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, it marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear. Silbey, one of America's most renowned political historians, offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, which included an exceptional cast of characters, from John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, to James K. Polk and Martin Van Buren. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces. After Texas statehood, it became a driving force in national affairs, ultimately leading to Southern secession and Civil War. With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"--and a pivotal moment in American history.
The war between the United States and Mexico was decades in the making. Although Texas was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, Texans retained an affiliation with the United States that virtually assured annexation at some point. Mexico's reluctance to give up Texas put it on a collision course with the United States. The Mexican War receives scant treatment in books. Most historians approach the conflict as if it were a mere prelude to the Civil War. The Mexican cession of 1848, however, rivaled the Louisiana Purchase in importance for the sheer amount of territory acquired by the United States. The dispute over slavery-which had been rendered largely academic by the Missouri Compromise-burst forth anew as Americans now faced the realization that they must make a decision over the institution's future. The political battle over the status of slavery in these new territories was the direct cause of the Crisis of 1850 and ignited sectional differences in the decade that followed. In Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas, Richard Bruce Winders provides a concise, accessible overview of the Mexican War and argues that the Mexican War led directly to the Civil War by creating a political and societal crisis that drove a wedge between the North and the South. While on the surface the enemy was Mexico, in reality Americans were at odds with one another over the future of the nation, as the issue of annexation threatened to upset the balance between free and slave states. Winders also explains the military connections between the Mexican War and Civil War, since virtually every important commander in the Civil War-including Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant, McClellan, and Longstreet-gained his introduction to combat in Mexico. These connections are enormously significant to the way in which these generals waged war, since it was in the Mexican War that they learned their trade. Crisis in the Southwest provides readers with a clear understandin
Vol. 3: A supplement, edited by Eldon Stephen Branda. Includes bibliographical references.
Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State engagingly tells the story of the Lone Star State, from the arrival of humans in the Panhandle more than 10,000 years ago to the opening of the twenty-first century. Focusing on the state's successive waves of immigrants, the book offers an inclusive view of the vast array of Texans who, often in conflict with each other and always in a struggle with the land, created a history and an idea of Texas. An Instructor's Resource Manual and a set of approximately 400 PowerPoint slides to accompany Gone to Texas, Third Edition, are now available to adopters. Please contact your local Oxford University Press representative for details.
“Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one.” —Rachel Maddow A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction) As Texas Goes . . . provides a trenchant yet often hilarious look into American politics and the disproportional influence of Texas, which has become the model for not just the Tea Party but also the Republican Party. Now with an expanded introduction and a new concluding chapter that will assess the influence of the Texas way of thinking on the 2012 election, Collins shows how the presidential race devolved into a clash between the so-called “empty places” and the crowded places that became a central theme in her book. The expanded edition will also feature more examples of the Texas style, such as Governor Rick Perry’s nearsighted refusal to accept federal Medicaid funding as well as the proposed ban on teaching “critical thinking” in the classroom. As Texas Goes . . . will prove to be even more relevant to American politics by the dawn of a new political era in January 2013.
Everyone knows that President George W. Bush is from Texas. But few of us know the role his home state plays in his presidency, and in our country. In this dual biography of man and state, Michael Lind confronts the chief crises of Bush's presidency--the economy, the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism--and traces their roots back to Texas, a state, Lind argues, that yields salient clues to the future course of our country.Widely praised as an iconoclastic and brilliant political observer, Lind, a fifth generation Texan, chronicles the ethnic clash that produced modern Texas, the well-known plundering of the state's natural resources at the hands of its elites, and finally the deep strain of "Old Testament religiosity" which, having originated in Texas, now reaches all over the globe in the form of Bush's foreign policy.In the tradition of Gary Wills's Reagan's America, Made in Texas provides a wholly original cultural history that should change the way we understand not just our president, but our country.