The Conquest of Texas


Book Description

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.




Texas Conquest


Book Description

From the moment Lorenzo Valdez saved Angie Torres from being crushed by an angry mule, he knew she was trouble. Having rolled her out of harm’s way, he can’t deny that he is intrigued by the soft, delicate woman, especially when she races away without telling him her name. Angie serves as a spy to the Texians, aiding them in the Texas Revolution. Her desire for the enemy soldier’s arms around her goes against everything she has been fighting for. However, their fate is intertwined and they are forced to work together. While Angie tries to protect her heart, Lorenzo must overcome his own demons. With the Texians on the verge of attacking San Antonio, Angie and Lorenzo have to fight not only for their right to love one another, but also for their lives and the future of Texas.




Cotton and Conquest


Book Description

This sweeping work of history explains the westward spread of cotton agriculture and slave labor across the South and into Texas during the decades before the Civil War. In arguing that the U.S. acquisition of Texas originated with planters’ need for new lands to devote to cotton cultivation, celebrated author Roger G. Kennedy takes a long view. Locating the genesis of Southern expansionism in the Jeffersonian era, Cotton and Conquest stretches from 1790 through the end of the Civil War, weaving international commerce, American party politics, technological innovation, Indian-white relations, frontier surveying practices, and various social, economic, and political events into the tapestry of Texas history. The innumerable dots the author deftly connects take the story far beyond Texas. Kennedy begins with a detailed chronicle of the commerce linking British and French textile mills and merchants with Southern cotton plantations. When the cotton states seceded from the Union, they overestimated British and French dependence on Southern cotton. As a result, the Southern plantocracy believed that the British would continue supporting the use of slaves in order to sustain the supply of cotton—a miscalculation with dire consequences for the Confederacy. As cartographers and surveyors located boundaries specified in new international treaties and alliances, they violated earlier agreements with Indian tribes. The Indians were to be displaced yet again, now from Texas cotton lands. The plantation system was thus a prime mover behind Indian removal, Kennedy shows, and it yielded power and riches for planters, bankers, merchants, millers, land speculators, Indian-fighting generals and politicians, and slave traders. In Texas, at the plantation system’s farthest geographic reach, cotton scored its last triumphs. No one who seeks to understand the complex history of Texas can overlook this book.




The Conquest of the Karankawas and the Tonkawas


Book Description

Chronicles the conquest of the Karankawas and Tonkawas Indians by white settlers in nineteenth-century Texas.




Big Wonderful Thing


Book Description

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.




Xicoténcatl


Book Description

As Spain's New World colonies fought for their independence in the early nineteenth century, an anonymous author looked back on the earlier struggle of native Americans against the Spanish conquistadores and penned this novel, Xicoténcatl. Writing from a decidedly anti-Spanish perspective, the author describes the historical events that led to the march on Tenochtitlán and eventual conquest of the Aztec empire in 1519 by Hernán Cortés and his Indian allies, the Tlaxcalans. Xicoténcatl stands out as a beautiful exposition of an idealized New World about to undergo the tremendous changes wrought by the Spanish Conquest. It was published in Philadelphia in 1826. In his introduction to this first English translation, Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliú discusses why the novel was published outside Latin America, its probable author, and his attitudes toward his Spanish and Indian characters, his debt to Spanish literature and culture, and the parallels that he draws between past and present struggles against Spanish domination in the Americas.




Texas Conquest


Book Description

This text discusses defensive planning, tactics and responses that may be made by the potential takeover target. It includes material reflecting critical developments in the fiduciary responsibility of directors; the latest generation of state takeover statutes; refinements in the poison pill and how the courts have responded, corporate restructurings as a potent target weapon, and other topics.




Sword of Empire


Book Description

Sword of Empire: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas from Columbus to Cortés, 1492–1529 is, by design, an approachable and accessible history of some of the most life-altering events in the story of man. Chipman examines the contributions of Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes in creating the foundations of the Spanish Empire in North America. Chipman has produced a readable and accurate narrative for students and the reading public, although some information presented on Cortes cannot be found elsewhere in print and is therefore of interest to specialists in the history of Spain in America. Exclusive material from Professor France V. Scholes and the author share insights into the multi layered complexities of a man born in 1484 and named at birth Fernando Cortes. As for Columbus, born in Genoa on the Italian peninsula in 1451 and given the name Cristobal de Colon, he is a more transformative man than Cortes in bringing Western Civilization to the major Caribbean islands in the Spanish West Indies and beyond. Historians strive to present a “usable past” and the post-Columbian world is, of course, the modern world. Columbus's discoveries, those of other mariners who followed to the south in America, and still other eastward to the Asia placed the world on the path of global interdependence-both good and ill-for peoples of the world. There are no footnotes in Sword of Empire—this is narrative at its finest—but there are extensive bibliographies for each chapter that will prove useful for readers of every background.




The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City


Book Description

"In 1325, the Aztecs founded their capital city Tenochtitlan, which grew to be one of the world's largest cities before it was violently destroyed in 1521 by conquistadors from Spain and their indigenous allies. Re-christened and reoccupied by the Spanish conquerors as Mexico City, it became the pivot of global trade linking Europe and Asia in the 17th century, and one of the modern world's most populous metropolitan areas. However, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and its people did not entirely disappear when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed it. By reorienting Mexico City-Tenochtitlan as a colonial capital and indigenous city, Mundy demonstrates its continuity across time. Using maps, manuscripts, and artworks, she draws out two themes: the struggle for power by indigenous city rulers and the management and manipulation of local ecology, especially water, that was necessary to maintain the city's sacred character. What emerges is the story of a city-within-a city that continues to this day"--




The Conquest All Over Again


Book Description

The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native people in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. This title addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest.