| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War. By Joel H. Silbey. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xxii, 230 pp. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-19-513944-0.)

Joel H. Silbey's thesis in Storm over Texas is straightforward: "the conflict over annexation and ... the political fallout from it, has fair claim as the critical base point on which the rest of the crisis of the union grew" insofar as annexation shifted "the dynamics of American politics" away from partisan divisions and toward sectional divisions (pp. xvii, xviii). Accordingly, following annexation, U.S. politics moved away from a "political vocabulary" of partisan competition expressed in the terms of dangers to "republican liberty," toward a vocabulary that "held sectional concerns to be the center of affairs" and demonized other sections (pp. 18–20). At this level of generality Silbey's thesis seems to resemble that of other political historians (see, for instance, Michael Morrison's 1997 Slavery and the American West), but what makes this book distinctive is its explanatory model for this political transformation.

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