Unsettled Land

From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas

By: Sam W. Haynes

Narrated by: Courage

A bold new history of the origins and aftermath of the Texas Revolution, revealing how Indians, Mexicans, and Americans battled for survival in one of the continent’s most diverse regions

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land, historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.

This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

Critic reviews

“History is always messy, yet the first half of the nineteenth century in Texas is especially so. Sam W. Haynes does a remarkable job conveying the conflicting visions of the numerous groups who fought over a land that elicited the best and worst in all of them. And he does it with an artful touch, drawing narrative order out of the historical chaos.”
—H.W. Brands, author of Our First Civil War

“Sam W. Haynes widens dramatically our angle of view beyond the canonical figures Travis, Crockett, and Bowie and in the process offers a thrilling, fresh, and deeply human narrative of early Texas. What a compelling read!"—Andrés Reséndez, author of The Other Slavery

"In Unsettled Land, Sam W. Haynes rescues the history of the Texas Revolution from romantic nationalism. He offers, instead, a gripping tragedy where a violent regime of racial exploitation supplanted an earlier experiment in multi-ethnic coexistence. Filled with vivid characters and dramatic plot twists, Unsettled Land reads like a nonfiction novel rich in insights about our present and past."—Alan Taylor, author of American Republics

"This brisk narrative illuminates the messy business of settlement, war, and independence in a multiracial borderland, and provides the most compelling history of Texas's founding in generations. Unsettled Land proves that no one knows the history of nineteenth-century Texas better than Sam W. Haynes."

—Amy S. Greenberg, author of Lady First

"This is the book we desperately need on the Texas Revolution. Unsettled Land shows Texas as it was, not as it has appeared on the set of The Alamo. Haynes’ Texas was a multiracial society, where free African Americans became prominent merchants, and where white land speculators staged revolts with Indigenous allies. For the likes of Sam Houston and Stephen Austin, the Texas Revolution promised freedom from Mexican rule. But for the Indigenous peoples and African Americans who had forged lives in Mexican-era Texas, independence signaled a loss of freedom. With gripping prose, Haynes captures both the drama and the complexity of the Mexican province that would eventually become the Lone Star State."—Alice L. Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom

Story is fine, narration is abysmal

If interested in the subject matter you will get a lot of info out of it, but be prepared to have it read to you as if by a college freshman who frequently did not prepare proper pronunciation. (“Steffan F. Austin, “Juan Se-gween”, “Co-leeto Creek,” “Spanish military presa-deeos,” “No-ayses River”, and so on)

Poor Narration

The book itself is interesting, well-written and important— information about the origins of Texas told from an impartial point if view. The narrator, unfortunately, reads the text with so many errors — mispronouncing words, ignoring punctuation, substituting incorrect words—that the listening experience is ruined.

Frustrating pronunciation and cadence

The “performer” reading the book repeatedly struggled to speak either linguistically correct or colloquially common pronunciations of names and places known to Texans. He also spoke with a cadence that consistently left the listener with the impression that a period has just ended a sentence, only to then carry on with that same sentence. This led to sentences like “after that time, they traveled west. …toward the Caprock. …escarpment. …in order to make their way. …to Santa Fe.”

Terrible narrator

Look, if you want to talk about South Texas history, get a South Texan. I feel like this is almost an insult to my ancestor who died at 'presi-dio' la Bahia.

Aggressively Uninteresting

If you like being bored…this is the way to go. It is difficult to think of a less interesting way to spend time.