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Book Review
Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 18231860. By Mark M. Carroll. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xx, 244 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-292-71227-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-292-71228-6.)
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Frontier Texas, with its mix of Mexican, Tejano, Native American, mestizo, African, mulatto, and Anglo ancestry, has long been the subject of political histories, but now Homesteads Ungovernable provides a social and legal history to explain the complicated and intricate sexual, familial, and racial relations of that era. Mark M. Carroll argues that Texas families, with such a mixture of peoples, laws, and cultures, had little chance of replicating or falling in line with "republican family" models commonly found in the United States. Nor did Texas necessarily resemble the South, with its patriarchal and authoritarian extensions into race and gender relations, as found by Peter Bardaglio in Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (1995). Carroll, while borrowing from Bardaglio's subtitle, rejects his "reductionist patriarchal paradigm" for Texas. |
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