Against the tumultuous backdrop of early Texas history, Williams sketches a vivid portrait of a truly American legend. Map.

The book follows General Sam Houston as he takes command of the Texas Volunteers to lead them to victory six weeks after the fall of the Alamo.

Sam Houston was one of the most extraordinary figures in American history. During his life, he held an astonishing range of positions: governor of two states (Tennessee and Texas), congressman (Tennessee), senator (Texas), and president of the Republic of Texas during its independence. He was an ardent expansionist who helped make Manifest Destiny a reality, and more than any other individual, he was responsible for Texas's entry into the United States. But Houston was a complex man whose life was marked by disappointments and failures. He had a lifelong drinking problem, which probably caused the dissolution of his first marriage, a scandal that caused him to resign as governor of Tennessee. Following that disgrace, Houston fled into Indian Territory and oblivion. After years of wandering in the wilderness, he came to Texas and political rebirth. Houston's military fame, forged in the War of 1812, brought him to the attention of the commanding general, Andrew Jackson, who made Houston his protégé and nurtured Houston's military career. In Texas, Houston's fellow settlers, determined to break free from Mexico, chose him to command the Texas Army. After a series of tactical retreats, Houston won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, crushing the army of Mexican general Santa Anna and guaranteeing Texas's independence. But even Houston's own officers quarreled over his victory and how much credit Houston deserved for it. As governor of Texas in 1861, Houston, fiercely pro-Union, refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy when Texas joined the new Southern nation, and he was forced from office. He died in 1863, a bloody war raging as he predicted it would following succession. This is a vivid, exciting biography of one of the giants of nineteenth-century America.

In the decades preceding the Civil War, few figures in the United States were as influential or as controversial as Sam Houston. In Sam Houston, James L. Haley explores Houston’s momentous career and the complex man behind it. Haley’s fifteen years of research and writing have produced possibly the most complete, most personal, and most readable Sam Houston biography ever written. Drawn from personal papers never before available as well as the papers of others in Houston’s circle, this biography will delight anyone intrigued by Sam Houston, Texas history, Civil War history, or America’s tradition of rugged individualism.

Houston, Texas, long thought of as a traditionally blue-collar black/white southern city, has transformed into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metro areas in the nation, surpassing even New York by some measures. With a diversifying economy and large numbers of both highly-skilled technical jobs in engineering and medicine and low-skilled minimum-wage jobs in construction, restaurant work, and personal services, Houston has become a magnet for the new divergent streams of immigration that are transforming America in the 21st century. And thanks to an annual systematic survey conducted over the past thirty-eight years, the ongoing changes in attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences have been measured and studied, creating a compelling data-driven map of the challenges and opportunities that are facing Houston and the rest of the country. In Prophetic City, we'll meet some of the new Americans, including a family who moved to Houston from Mexico in the early 1980s and is still trying to find work that pays more than poverty wages. There's a young man born to highly-educated Indian parents in an affluent Houston suburb who grows up to become a doctor in the world's largest medical complex, as well as a white man who struggles with being prematurely pushed out of the workforce when his company downsizes. This timely and groundbreaking book tracks the progress of an American city like never before. Houston is at the center of the rapid changes that have redefined the nature of American society itself in the new century. Houston is where, for better or worse, we can see the American future emerging.