A Military History of Texas by Loyd Uglow

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Military History of Texas by Loyd Uglow Christopher M. Rein A Military History of Texas. By Loyd Uglow. War and the Southwest Series. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-865-1.) While the state flag of Nevada bears the phrase “Battle Born,” Loyd Uglow’s A Military History of Texas demonstrates that the appellation applies equally to the Lone Star State. Long a contested borderland between various Indigenous peoples and European colonizers, the modern state of Texas is very much a creation of the series of nineteenth-century wars and irregular conflicts that defined its modern borders, privileged certain groups of immigrants, and determined its current form of government. The author clearly demonstrates that Texas’s history is military history, and that military conflict has been instrumental in the formation of modern Texas. Uglow organizes his work chronologically, moving from pre-Columbian warfare to Texas’s involvement in current conflicts, and he relies almost exclusively on secondary sources, as is necessary for a work of this breadth. With a few exceptions, these sources are well chosen and represent the most current literature in the field. The nineteenth century dominates the work, reflecting both the author’s interests and the role the various wars of that period had in carving the Republic of Texas out of Mexico, attaching it to the United States, [End Page 165] and depopulating the state of the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for centuries. Uglow provides a straightforward accounting of events, with some bias shown toward the declared wars and set-piece battles that dominate traditional military history, though there is some attention in later chapters to irregular warfare and the home front. A too-brief conclusion of just eleven pages (with one page devoted to the 2009 Fort Hood shootings) covers the entire period since World War II, and it delivers an at times celebratory accounting of the manpower and resources that Texas contributed to the growth of militarism in the United States and the nation’s various military adventures of the past eighty years. By providing a strict narration of mostly well known events, Uglow misses a number of opportunities to provide more in-depth analysis, especially analysis reflecting the “war and society” turn in military history. Other than brief mentions of “racially motivated” violence during Reconstruction and the violence that erupted between white residents of Houston and Black soldiers stationed there during World War I (which the author labels a “mutiny”), there is little attention paid to the impact of military conflict on the state’s troubled history of race relations (pp. 243, 307). Similarly, despite the long history of violence along the state’s southern border, with armed incursions emanating from both Mexico and the United States, and notable episodes of brutality committed by the state-authorized Texas Rangers, the author offers a spare analysis of how this legacy impacts current views of border security both within the state and across the nation, or of the lingering hostility and mistrust among the state’s Anglo and Hispanic residents. There is little discussion of how Texas’s violent past, including the frequent incursions by both Comanche and Mexican raiders, continues to influence both racial views and positions on issues such as gun rights in the modern state. However, Uglow does point out that the Texas Revolution began with an attempted confiscation of firearms by Mexican officials. Citing works such as Susannah J. Ural’s Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge, 2017), which fully explores the connections between military forces and the societies that raise and sustain them, might have helped the author move past the detailed accounting of well-chronicled events to offer some explanation of how military history shaped modern Texas society, and how that culture continues to influence larger events and movements in the nation as a whole. Thus, the book fully achieves its limited aim of recounting Texas’s military past but misses an opportunity to highlight its broader significance and, thereby, to make a larger contribution to the existing literature. Christopher M. Rein Air...