| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gary Clayton Anderson. Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2005. Pp. x, 494. $29.95.
The title of this book by Gary Clayton Anderson suggests not only the subject matter but its narrative tone as well. "Ethnic cleansing" is not a term commonly applied by Americans to the history of the United States. It seems even less applicable to Texans in describing their own state's proud history. The interpretative tone is provocative throughout the narrative, and it targets Texas traditional history and its hagiography. At the outset, Anderson justifies the presentist use of the term "ethnic cleansing," but he defines it and proceeds to defend his argument. He drives a forceful argument on the brutality of Anglo-American expansion in the conquest of Texas lands. His singularity of purpose gives a unity of style to each chapter that pointedly critiques ethnic cleansing and implicitly, the Texan identity.	1
This is only the latest in a growing number of books to confront the mythology and hagiography in Texas history. Recent books have also begun to address the state's violent "lynching culture," atrocities by the Texas Rangers, and conquest as the Texas legacy. This book is distinctive in that it focuses on the American Indian experience, but it must be seen as part of the growing critique of the state's history (see, for example, William D. Carrigan, The Making of A Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 [2004]).	2
The author offers a new paradigm of violence as policy. As "an Anglo-Texas strategy and a policy," the Texas Creed cleansed Texas of Indians and native Mexicans, or Tejanos, through fifty years of violence and warfare unprecedented in American history (p. 7). Although the analysis is harshly worded, Anderson's methodology is most useful in understanding how the legacy of conquest has structured ethnic and national identities in Texas history.	. . .

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