This is not your grandfather’s history of Texas. Portraying nineteenth-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing. The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded: by the 1870s, Indians had been driven from central and western Texas. By confronting head-on the romanticized version of Texas history that made heroes out of Houston, Lamar, and Baylor, Anderson helps us understand that the history of the Lone Star state is darker and more complex than the mythmakers allowed.

James Callahan entered Texas armed, a quixotic young man enlisted in the Georgia Battalion for the cause of independence. He barely survived the 1836 Battle of Refugio and the Goliad Massacre. Undaunted by the perils of his adopted home, he remained in the line of fire for the next twenty-one years, fighting to protect Texas settlers from Apaches, Comanches, Seminoles, Kickapoos, outlaws, mavericks and the Mexican army. As a Texas Ranger, he rode with the legendary men of Seguin and San Antonio. In 1855, he commanded the punitive expedition into Mexico that bears his name, a fiasco that has been shrouded by mystery and shadowed by controversy ever since. In this first-ever biography, Joseph Luther traces the tragic course of the wayfarer who crossed so much of the Texas frontier and created so much of its story.

The Texas Longhorn made more history than any othr breed of cattle the world has known. Their story is the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.

The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas. Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.