Product details
- ISBN 9781477330746
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Nov 2024
- Publisher: University of Texas Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
2022 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters
An in-depth history of the Civil War in the Texas Hill Country, this book examines patterns of violence on the Texas frontier to illuminate white Americans’ cultural and political priorities in the nineteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between white settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slaveholding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence, as one set of peoples, states, and systems eventually displaced others.
In this painstakingly researched book, Roland analyzes patterns of violence in the Texas Hill Country to examine the cultural and political priorities of white settlers and their interaction with the century-defining process of national integration and state-building in the Civil War era. He traces the role of violence in the region from the eve of the Civil War, through secession and the Indian wars, and into Reconstruction. Revealing a bitter history of warfare, criminality, divided communities, political violence, vengeance killings, and economic struggle, Roland positions the Texas Hill Country as emblematic of the Southwest of its time.
Nicholas Roland is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, DC.
