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Lone Star Nation
- How a Ragged Army of Courageous Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 17 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's Summary
From best-selling historian and longtime Texan H. W. Brands, a richly textured history of one of the most fascinating and colorful eras in U.S. history - the Texas Revolution and the forging of a new America.
"For better or for worse, Texas was very much like America. The people ruled, and little could stop them. If they ignored national boundaries, if they trampled the rights of indigenous peoples and of imported bondsmen, if they waged war for motives that started from base self-interest, all this came with the territory of democracy, a realm inhabited by ordinarily imperfect men and women. The one saving grace of democracy - the one that made all the difference in the end - was that sooner or later, sometimes after a terrible strife, democracy corrected its worst mistakes." (Lone Star Nation)
Lone Star Nation is the gripping story of Texas's precarious journey to statehood, from its early colonization in the 1820s to the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad by the Mexican army, from its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches to its day of liberation as an upstart republic.
H. W. Brands tells the turbulent story of Texas through the eyes of a colorful cast of characters who have become a permanent fixture in the American landscape: Stephen Austin, the state's reluctant founder; Sam Houston, the alcoholic former governor who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisis and glory; William Travis, James Bowie, and David Crockett, the unforgettable heroic defenders of the doomed Alamo; Santa Anna, the Mexican generalissimo and dictator whose ruthless tactics galvanized the colonists against him; and the white-haired President Andrew Jackson whose expansionist aspirations loomed large in the background.
Beyond these luminaries, Brands unearths the untold stories of the forgotten Texans - the slaves, women, unknown settlers, and children left out of traditional histories - who played crucial roles in Texas’s birth. By turns bloody and heroic, tragic and triumphant, this riveting history of one of our greatest states reads like the most compelling fiction, and further secures H. W. Brands's position as one of the premier American historians.
What the critics say
"It's hard to think that the story could be better told." (Publishers Weekly)
"Brands' impressive integrative account of the fabled Texas revolution of the 1830s relates key incidents and displays trenchant psychological insights, engraving both with the fundamental forces involved....[An] excellent, fair-minded chronicle." (Booklist)
"The author is so conversant with the intricacies of his subject that he assumes a degree of familiarity in the reader....Of the legendary characters who died there, Mr. Brands is notably clear-eyed." (The New York Times)
What listeners say about Lone Star Nation
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Austin Fusilier
- 2018-09-13
Succinct, But Not Much More
A thorough and able telling of the historical events leading to and through the Texas Revolution and their annexation into the United States. Though the book ends well (its flourish in an examination of Sam Houston's having to preside over the dissolution of the annexation he strove so hard to facilitate), through most of its length the narrative merely navigates from event to event. It makes good use of epistolary sources and written accounts from several sides of the conflict, but it serves mostly as a summary.
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