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 25 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Sam W. Haynes (P)2022 Basic Books

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)

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)

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.”

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.

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.

Unfortunate narration

The narrator mispronounced so many words—in Spanish and English—that it was distracting and hard to listen.

Terrible narration

If I have to hear this narrator mispronounce another word I may scream. Impossible to get involved in the story due to the terrible narration. Wish I had bought the book instead of recording