Gone to Texas 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.
Striking a balance between revisionist and traditional approaches to history, author Randolph B. Campbell tells the stories of the colorful individuals and events that shaped the history of Texas, giving equal treatment to the lives of men like Sam Houston and to women and minorities in Texas’s history. He addresses the fact that Texas is widely regarded as a special state-a place with a story that appeals to millions of people, many of whom have never even been there-and examines what created this idea of Texan distinctiveness. Organized chronologically, the text focuses on five main themes: Texas as a “forgotten” province of the Spanish empire that was only protected when some other nation threatened to occupy it; the interpretation of the Texas Revolution as a clash between two disparate cultures rather than as a deliberate, pre-conceived plan by the U.S. to steal the province from Mexico; the identification of Texas as a Southern rather than Western state in terms of its demographic, cultural, economic, and political influences and development; Texas’s distinction not as a “unique” state but rather as the exaggerated embodiment of traditional American ideals and emotions such as individualism, personal liberty, and violence; and the two-hundred-year-old history of Texas as a destination for immigrants seeking new opportunities.
Vividly capturing the adventure and conflict of this state’s legendary past, Gone to Texas is ideal for undergraduate courses in Texas history.
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Wondering which Texas history to buy? It really depends on what you like, but I think this is the best of the lot. Better than Fehrenbach. Better than Haley. A word of warning about all Texas histories: They tend to subordinate everything to politics. This one does a better job than the others concerning Texas’ rich cultural history, but the major emphases are still what you’d expect. Spanish settlement. Texas Revolution. Civil War. Development of the Oil Empire and its relation to state politics. I really hope someday we get a good comprehensive cultural history of the state, but until then this one will have to do. And it does quite well.This book is very well written and researched, with a nice balance of biography, demographics and narrative. I’d say it’s probably a bit more scholarly than popular, but the writing is still easily accessible. Buy this one if you’re serious about Texas history.
Well written summary Concise and well written. It could have had more maps, but almost all histories have this fault. Campbell is a better writer than many other historians, but in places he does reflect a modern prejudice or failure to understand the thinking of the times about which he writes.Writing of slavery, he says, “Planters did not have their capital ‘tied up,’ as some like to say, in slaves. Slave property could be liquidated easily. But planters had no economic or financial reason to do so.” Well, some “like to say” this because it is relevant to a different question: not the question of what individual planters could do, but what they could do as a class if the slavery system were suddenly ended. In that event, planters would not at all have been able to easily liquidate slave property, and they knew that. Thus ending slavery peacefully would have had to overcome this financial problem, though not necessarily to everybody’s perfect satisfaction. Solutions were possible, but the slave-holding class claimed that the system could continue unchanged indefinitely. Ultimately, because of polarization and failure to compromise, slavery was ended in the worst manner possible, through civil war.I sometimes wonder whether history writers of our time are sufficiently knowledgable of religious formation in their historical period. Campbell writes, of a certain freedman, that he was “well versed in the survival skills learned in bondage” and “had served as the supervisor of registrars in his district, traveling at night for safety and acting, he wrote, ‘as wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove.’” But this particular freedman likely knew, not just “survival skills learned in bondage,” but also the Gospels. Many readers nowadays would not recognize the quoted phrase as coming directly from Matthew 10:16. Mentioning the Gospel source would have fit into the sentence but was omitted, and I was left wondering whether Campbell himself knew the source.Despite my criticisms of this book, it does deserve the five-star rating and is a good introduction to the subject. The attentive reader of this book would come to understand what a large subject Texas history is, but ought to feel a need for further reading.
what a resource for Texas history… In Randolph B. Campbell’s Gone To Texas he discusses every aspect of Texas’s society, political nature, economy, etc. He starts out during the first arrival of humans in the area and ends with George W. Bush as governor of the state. The reading is quick and easy, passing from one topic to the next with ease. It does not feel like you are reading a textbook. It feels as if you are reading an intriguing tale about the people and events that affected the growth of Texas into what it is today.It is impressive in its scope and depth. Only reading through it once, I have learned a vast amount about Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico, the role Texans had in the numerous United States wars, the political atmosphere of Texas (being mainly a one party state) after the Civil War, and the many political and non-political figures that shaped the personality of the state. Anything you need to know about Texas is in this book and I would highly recommend it to Texas enthusiasts and history buffs. Everyone enjoy!