Book Description
The decade 1910Â-1920 was the bloodiest in the controversial history of one of the most famous law enforcement agencies in the world—the Texas Rangers. Much of the bloodshed was along the thousand-mile Texas/Mexico border because these were the years of the Mexican Revolution.
Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler shed new light on this turbulent period by uncovering the clandestine role of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza in the border violence. They document two virtually unknown invasions of Texas by Mexican Army troops acting under Carranza's orders. Harris and Sadler suggest the notorious "Plan de San Diego," usually portrayed by historians as a plot hatched in South Texas, was actually spawned in Mexico by Carranza. This irredentist conspiracy, which called for the execution of all Anglo males sixteen and older and the establishment of a Hispanic republic, was designed to cause a race war between Hispanics and Anglos. One of CarranzaÂ's goals was to end the support being given by border residents to his rival Pancho Villa.
The "Plan de San Diego" caused the governor of Texas to order the Texas Rangers to wipe out the insurgency along the border. This resulted in an estimated 300 Hispanics being killed by the Rangers and others without benefit of judge and jury.
The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution is the first Ranger history to utilize Mexican government archives and the voluminous declassified FBI records on the Mexican Revolution.
"There is no other book that focuses on the Texas Rangers in the period 1910-1920. This will be the standard book on the Rangers for this period and probably the most thoroughly researched book on the Rangers in any period."--Alwyn Barr, Professor of History, Texas Tech University
"Harris and Sadler provide the first definitive evaluation of the Texas Rangers and their activities during the first and most violent decade of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. This is a really outstanding, important work"--William H. Beezley, Professor of Latin American History, University of Arizona
The authors document the secret role of the Mexican president in the insurgency against Anglos during the Mexican Revolution and the Texas Rangers' role in ending the uprising.
Customer Reviews:
The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920.......2007-02-12
Written by authors trying to prove a point. Once you get by their prejudice it is a good historical read of the times, which are still relevant today
The Bloodiest Decade Revisted.......2006-12-14
The Mexican Revolution was at its most bloody point during this decade and spilled over to the United States on some occasions. This book analyzes the role of the Texas Rangers, Untied States Military and other groups during the time of the revolution. Mostly it is a policing action to keep violence from spilling over into El Paso but occasionally they are attacking cattle rustlers who cross the border including Pancho Villa. The Texas Rangers were essential in defending the frontier during this timer period and performed many valuable services. While there are several books that exist on the Texas Rangers this is the only one that I have run across that really explains their role within Texas as a whole. Both authors do an excellent job of bringing their knowledge about the revolution and weaving it within the context of Texas History. Their discussion of the Plan de San Diego which was an attempted revolt by Mexicans across the border was truly terrifying and they do an excellent job of giving the governments response to it. This book is excellent for anyone who wants a knowledge about how state forces responded to a crisis during the early 1900's. For those who love the Texas Rangers this is a must have to their library.
Texas-Mexican border tensions in early 1900s.......2004-10-29
During the decade of 1910-20, tensions between Mexico and the United States over incidents relating to Pancho Villa's threat to Mexico's president Venustiano Carranza and U. S. incursions into Mexico led by General John Pershing had become so tense that the "situation was not dissimilar to that of Jewish settlers in the West Bank"; with the small number of white Texans along the border being compared to the Jewish settlers surrounded by a much greater number of resentful Palestinians. In this situation, the Texas governors of this decade--Colquitt, Ferguson, and Hobby--used the Texas Rangers to protect Texas citizens and combat the tactics of Mexicans directed by Carranza and in some cases acting as vigilantes. The unique and in ways controversial activities of the Texas Rangers in this complex, volatile, and fluid situation is the subject the authors hone in on. Harris and Sadler, both former professors at New Mexico State U., bring to light little-known dimensions of the historical events, which continue to affect relationships and feelings between the white Texans and Hispanics in the area. There was much lawlessness on both sides. Mexican Army troops dressed as civilians crossed the border to raid Texas communities. After Texas Rangers executed two Mexican agitators after taking them by force from the F.B.I., the U. S. Attorney General issued an order that all prisoners henceforth be held by the U. S. Army. The situation was especially complicated not only because of points of opposition between Texas and the U. S. Federal Government, but also because of Mexican president Carranza's desire for recognition by the U. S. while trying at the same time to stand up to it. While concentrating on the unique role of the Rangers in this complex historical situation, Harris and Sadler also construct the context in which their activities took place.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Thomson Gale on November 1, 2005. The length of the article is 869 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920.(Book Review)
Author: Andrew Graybill
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 71
Issue: 4
Page: 918(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
In Race: The History of an Idea in the West Ivan Hannaford guides readers through a dangerous engagement with an idea that so permeates Western thinking that we expect to find it, active or dormant, as an organizing principle in all societies. But, Hannaford shows, race is not a universal idea--not even in the West. It is an idea with a definite pedigree, and Hannaford traces that confused pedigree from Hesiod to the Holocaust and beyond.
Hannaford begins by examining the ideas of race supposedly held in the ancient world, contrasting them with the complex social, philosophical, political, and scientific ideas actually held at the time. Through the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods he critically examines precursors in history, science, and philosophy. Hannaford distinguishes those cultures' ideas of social inclusion, rank, and role from modern ones based on race. But he also finds the first traces of the modern ideas of race in the proto-sciences of late medieval cabalism and hermeticism. Following that trail forward, he describes the establishment of the modern scientific and philosophical notions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shows how those notions became popular and pervasive, even among those who claim to be nonracist.
At the same time, Hannaford sets out an alternative to a race-based notion of humanity. In his examination of ancient Greece, he finds in what was then a dazzling new idea, politics, a theory of how to bring a purposeful oneness to a society composed of diverse families, tribes, and interests. This idea of politics has a history, too, and its presence has waxed and waned through the ages.
At a time when new controversies have again raised the question of whether race and social destiny are ineluctably joined as partners, Race: The History of an Idea in the West reveals that one of the partners is a phantom--medieval astrology and physiognomy disguised by pseudoscientific thought. And Race raises a difficult practical question: What price do we place on our political traditions, institutions, and civic arrangements? This ambitious volume reexamines old questions in new ways that will stimulate a wide readership.
Customer Reviews:
Good on Modern Racism.......2004-04-11
This book contains a lot of good information, but its basic thesis is flawed. There is nothing new about the idea of race, i.e. a group of people emerging from a common origin and thus sharing a common character. Hannaford does not understand that the original meaning of the Latin derived "nation" meant not a country but a race. Thus, whenever people in the past discussed "nations and peoples" they meant races. In fact, the Bible provides a genealogy of race in Genesis Chapter 10 where it explains the origin of all races from Noah's three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Shem's descendants populated Asia, Japheth's descendants populated Europe, and Ham's descendants populated Africa. Thus, each race had a forefather and through him shared a common blood. This Noachian genealogy as it was called formed the basis for all modern ideas of race. Linnaeus division into mongoloid, caucasian, and negroid corresponded to the three sons. Unfortunately, Hannaford's desire to ignore biblical ideas of race misses the fact that Christians already were racist and explains why less-educated but highly-religious people remained the most racist. Thus, he can not explain the interesting story of how science altered and questioned old assumptions about race. While early philologists such as Frederick Schlegel and William Grimm assumed that race corresponded to language and one could trace blood connections through studying language, anthropologists such as Rudolf Virchow showed that the groups considered to be nations based on shared language and culture were not pure races. While there is a lot of good research about race in this book, it needs to be supplemented by Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth that provides a much more accurate understanding of pre-Enlightenment racial conceptions.
The History of Western Scientific Racism.......2000-05-19
I highly recommend this book. A well detailed account of the development of scientific racism in the West, showing that it has become a deeply rooted and fundamental aspect of our culture. An another important book on the subject is "The Aryan Myth" by Ivan Polikov, but Hannaford's work concentrates in the evolution of racist thinking in scientific circles, and links much of its influence to pseudo-scientific occult theories, and in particular, the Jewish Kabbalah. According to the Hannaford, racist theories developed from the Kabbalistic interpretation of the curse of Ham, and it was the the Kabbalistic science of physiognomy, the study of facial features with the goal of recognizing the elect, that introduced type-thinking to the West. What makes Hannaford's work stand out from others of its kind, is his establishment of this most important conncection. I only gave the book 4 stars, because, unfortunately, I don't believe he explored the subject sufficiently. ...
Book Description
"In editing this collection, Martha Hodes has performed an invaluable service to those of us in the profession who endeavor to teach what has been the focus of our own scholarship: race and sex."
—The Journal of Southern History
"Important. . . . The breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing."
—Journal of Social History
"Hodes has compiled a thoughtful collection of essays which explore the implications of interracial sexual activity from the colonial period to the late 20th century."
—Virginia Quarterly Review
Since pre-colonial days, America has been both torn apart and united by love, sex, and marriage across racial boundaries. Whether motivated by violent conquest, economics, lust, or love, such unions have disturbed some of America's most sacred beliefs and prejudices.
Sex, Love, Race provides a historical foundation for contemporary discussions of sex across racial lines, which, despite the numbers of interracial marriages and multiracial children, remains a controversial issue today. The first historical anthology to focus solely and widely on the subject,
Sex, Love, Race gathers new essays by both younger and well-known scholars which probe why and how the specter of sex across racial boundaries has so threatened Americans of all colors and classes.
Traversing the whole of American history, from liaisons among Indians, Europeans, and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists' fascination with sex between "Orientals" and whites, the essays cover a range of regions, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. In so doing,
Sex, Love, Race, sketches a larger portrait of the overlapping construction of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities in America.
Customer Reviews:
an interesting collection.......2004-04-26
This is an interesting collection of tales of inter racial politics as it applies to love making and sexual relations in America. Many subjects are covered in these essays. From the development of 'aggressive' homosexual women in prisons to the fascination of people for 'oriental' relations between whites and Asians. Also explored is the phenomenon of black and white sexual liaisons. A good review of American melting in the pot of racial diversity.
Seth J. Frantzman
Book Description
Booker T. Washington has long held an ambiguous position in the pantheon of black leadership. Lauded by some in his own lifetime as a black George Washington, he was also derided by others as a Benedict Arnold. In The Education of Booker T. Washington, Michael West offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most complex and controversial figures in American history. West reveals the personal and political dimensions of Washington's journey "up from slavery." He explains why Washington's ideas resonated so strongly in the post-Reconstruction era and considers their often negative influence in the continuing struggle for equality in the United States. West's work also establishes a groundwork for understanding the ideological origins of the civil rights movement and discusses Washington's views on the fate of race and nation in light of those of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and others.
West argues that Washington's analysis was seen as offering a "solution" to the problem of racial oppression in a nation professing its belief in democracy. That solution was the idea of "race relations." In practice, this theory buttressed segregation by supposing that African Americans could prosper within Jim Crow's walls and without the normal levers by which other Americans pursued their interests. Washington did not, West contends, imagine a way to perfect democracy and an end to the segregationist policies of southern states. Instead, he offered an ideology that would obscure the injustices of segregation and preserve some measure of racial peace.
White Americans, by embracing Washington's views, could comfortably find a way out of the moral and political contradictions raised by the existence of segregation in a supposedly democratic society. This was (and is) Washington's legacy: a form of analysis, at once obvious and concealed, that continues to prohibit the realization of a truly democratic politics.
Book Description
The war had been won. Now what? This was the pressing political question for the United States in 1784, and a consuming one for George Washington. He had laid down his sword and returned home to Mount Vernon after eight and a half years as commander of the Continental Army. He vowed that he had retired forever, that he would be a farmer on the bank of the Potomac River, under his own "vine and fig tree." But history was not done with him, and he was not done with history.
Within a year, as Joel Achenbach relates in this stunning narrative, Washington saddled up and rode away on one of the most daring journeys of his rich and adventurous life: a trek across the Appalachian mountains to the frontier, where he would inspect his long-neglected western property and try to collect rent.
The Grand Idea is the story of Washington's ambitions for the brand-new republic that he had fought so hard to create. His western journey culminates in a breathtaking scheme: Washington, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, will transform the Potomac River into a commercial artery that will link the new West to the old East. Worried that the newborn country was so fragmented that it might literally split into two separate and rival nations, he uses the skills he learned as a young backwoods surveyor to come up with his river plan. The future of the Union, Washington believes, depends on the Potomac route to the West, which will bind the country to one enterprise.
Achenbach's sympathetic and wry portrait of General Washington is not the stiff figure of official portraits, but that of a bold man who plunges into uncharted forest and sleeps in a downpour with only his cloak for shelter. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, and land speculator. He loves the West. This Washington is someone who understands that the fledgling republic clinging to the Atlantic seaboard will become a great and booming nation.
Achenbach tracks Washington's river plan from the choosing of the site for the national capital, which led to his being elected as the first president, to its link, decades after his death, to various grandiose plans for a canal that would run hundreds of miles. Ultimately the dream of a Potomac route to the West is abandoned. The nation splits not East and West but North and South, and the river becomes a boundary between warring sides in the Civil War.
Like such classics as Undaunted Courage and Founding Brothers, Achenbach's The Grand Idea is a large narrative of a great man and his grand plan that captures the uncertainties and conflicts of the new country, the passions of an ambitious people, and the seemingly endless beauty of the American landscape.
Customer Reviews:
An Outstanding Book.......2007-05-20
Grand Idea has not gotten the attention it deserves, it seems to me.
It is a compelling, outstanding addition to books about the revoluntionary war period, and is a terrific bit of biography recounting Washington's life following his retirement from the Army in 1783.
This book is not only informative, but is a highly entertaining read.
I hope that Joel Achenbach takes on another such project soon. Ellis, Ferling, McCullough, Woods, Chernow step aside and make room for Achenbach.
A Great Introduction to Washington's Early Years .......2007-02-17
A great introduction to Washington's early years and exploits before the Revolutionary War and his compulsion with exploring and establishing the Potomac region as the gateway to the West. Can be a bit dull when it discusses geography in parts, but overall really interesting.
The grand idea that wasn't.......2006-07-01
Joel Achenbach begins with, as he admits himself, a small incident in the life of George Washington: a tour he took of his properties in western Pennsylvania in 1784; much of this trip was made by way of the Potomac River. Washington believed the Potomac would be the perfect Gateway to the West, connecting the Atlantic seaboard with the Ohio River, requiring only a few portages between connecting rivers along the way beyond Cumberland, MD. He was especially keen on this idea after the establishment of the nation's capital on the banks of the river just below the Great Falls. The idea flopped: besides natural obstacles, the river was just not deep enough to handle the ships that would be plying its waters; also (and Achenbach makes little mention of this) new settlers were already streaming across the Alleghenies via numerous trails well established in PA - the main viaduct to the West from the end of the Revolutionary War to the completion of the Erie Canal. But Achenbach would have a very short book if he ended it there. Instead he develops the use of the river through the canal age (the C&O graces its banks), the railroad era (the B&O ran along its banks in spots), right up to the highway period. The book becomes something it didn't seem to start out being and by the half-way point has little to do with George Washington or the Potomac River itself. Achenbach is a popular historian - his prose is laced with modern slang terms and his research is all based on second-hand sources. Despite this, he is a good writer, able to capture our interest: his account of Washington's final days before his death is powerful and moving. But basically the book is an overview of the value of the Potomac River as a thruway to the West; it's a mildly compelling though interesting book, but not very penetrating. It's a good capsule history.
A Hero, An Idea, A River, and A Republic.......2006-05-10
`The Grand Idea' is a book with a very loose central theme - George Washington's vision (share by many others) of the westward expansion of the young United States, and his idea to use the Potomac River as the crucial tie that would bind the trans-Appalachian western frontier to the coastal population center. The book meanders, (much like the undisciplined and changeable river in its subtitle), all over from that center, covering much of the history of the republic from the end of The Revolution to the end of Washington's life, and then beyond.
Through the first ten chapters, starting with Washington's trip across the mountains into Western Pennsylvania in 1784, then winding leisurely through the second half of Washington's career, the book sometimes approaches closely to the theme of Washington's Potomac improvement plan, but often veers sharply away while examining other aspects of Washington's presidency and the early republic. The book's pace changes dramatically in the last five chapters, going from a lazy stream to raging rapids. Four of the final five chapters cover the history of the United States from 1800 through the Civil War, concentrating on internal improvements such as canals, turnpikes, and railroads, but hitting on such historical markers as the Lewis and Clark expedition and the War of 1812 as well. The final chapter details the state of the Potomac River in the twenty-first century, and serves as a "where are they now" look back on many of the internal improvements and key locations from earlier in the book.
It would be easy for me to dismiss this book as poorly focused, light-weight, popular history, yet I can't quite do that. While there is no doubt that Achenbach's book is pop history, and often light-weight and lacking focus, it is also a well written and compelling story, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The first ten chapters, covering Washington's career from the end of the Revolution to the end of his life, introduce many important but often overlooked episodes of American history, including Shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Indian Wars of the 1790s, and the compromise which led to the building of Washington D.C., and includes a cast of semi-obscure, fascinating American characters who merit further study, including Albert Gallatin, Light Horse Harry Lee, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. While it has nothing to teach scholars of the period, for the novice, it is a fun to read crash-course on the early republic, suggesting many fascinating avenues of continued study.
Theo Logos
An Overlooked Example of Washington's Vision.......2005-02-07
Although George Washington made a geographic miscalculation in thinking the Potomac River would be the "front door" on to "the fertile plains of the Western Country"-he was right (as usual) about his vision of the western-oriented destiny that awaited his countrymen.
In the very lively and interesting The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West, Joel Achenbach, a staff writer for the Washington Post and science columnist for National Geographic, tells the story of Washington's western trip soon after the Revolution. He made this journey in 1784: up the Potomac, across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio valley country of western Pennsylvania. The rugged 34-day, 680-mile trip by canoe and horseback was made in part to collect rents on Washington's long-neglected western properties. The trip helped to protect Washington's private interests, but it also crystallized his belief that the Potomac was the natural passage to the continental interior. This belief became somewhat of an obsession, not only because of personal motivation, but also because Washington thought the Potomac waterway would bind the 13 new states with the unsettled West through "the cement of interest." That is, a strong commercial connection that would prevent a possible future split due to emerging political differences and foreign influence.
Achenbach's entertaining book has a fluid and almost conversational style, and its story goes beyond the early attempts to commercially navigate the shallow and fickle Potomac by Washington's envisioned system of canals and locks. His later chapters especially blend biography, geography and history, while examining the importance of the Erie Canal, the coming of railroads, the Civil War as well as the Potomac as it is today. In the end, Washington's Potomac waterway never materialized. The river was not the ideal water route to the west, and was simply not navigable under normal circumstances, and certainly not by nineteenth-century standards. Nonetheless, Achenbach's appealing depiction of Washington smoothly tells the story of a restless entrepreneur and practical visionary who understood better than anyone that the future of the Union he helped to create lay in common national interests and energetic western expansion. After all, while Franklin, Jefferson and Adams had traveled to the salons of London and Paris, Washington had gone to the wilderness at the forks of the Ohio.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Thomson Gale on August 1, 2007. The length of the article is 648 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations.(Book review)
Author: Clarence, E. Walker
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 73
Issue: 3
Page: 720(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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