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Book Review
| The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910–1920. By Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. xiv, 673 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-8263-3483-0.)
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| The performance of the Texas Rangers during the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920, has been a subject of controversy ever since. Ranger atrocities resulted in the disbanding of an entire company. It also brought what was a probably overdue legislative investigation of the service as a whole. Several books have been written about the era in recent years, but perhaps the most thorough is The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution, by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler. |
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The most refreshing aspect of this book is its scrapping of political correctness in favor of those increasingly obscure commodities, facts. All too often, we are subjected to books where material is carefully selected to uphold a particular political or social agenda. That is especially true in studies of services that historically have been controversial, such as the Texas Rangers. Harris and Sadler present the facts without any window dressing. The result is perhaps the most neutral book in a long time. In their view, everyone had justice on his side, yet at the same time everyone was a bad guy. A typical statement is "Militant Hispanics were outraged that the Americans stole Texas from the Mexicans—who stole it from the Spaniards, who stole it from the Indians, who stole it from each other" (p. 212). |
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