In mid-April of 2006 The Free Press, the prestige nonfiction imprint of Simon and Schuster, published my PASSIONATE NATION: The Epic History of Texas.

Texas history is such a vast subject that you would think that more attempts would have been made at general overviews.Ý But aside from one excellent textbook (Tyler, Marks & de la Teja, TEXAS: Crossroads of North America, Houghton Mifflin 2004), and an equally good professorial crossover (Campbell, GONE TO TEXAS, Oxford University Press 2003), T.R. Fehrenbach¼s LONE STAR, which first appeared in 1968, has had the shelf pretty much to itself.Ý The last one before that was Rupert Richardson¼s Lone Star State, a textbook that has seen life on the trade shelf by default since 1943.

As with a few of my other books, this one originated with the publisher. At first they didn¼t want a big scholarly monster going back to original sources, but after working with Free Press for a while, I realized that they don't do light fare.Ý With their roster of serious prize winners and finalists, the pressure built for the Texas tome to be good.

In going back to original sources, I was struck by what an edited version of the history we¼ve always seen. For instance, with all the prominence of the gay rights debate in the news today, I was astonished to find a long-edited-out homosexual presence in Texas history going all the way back to the beginning. When Cabeza de Vaca was wandering from tribe to tribe across Texas in the early 1530s, he sometimes found Indian warriors living, conjugally, together, and wrote about it in his memoir.Ý One of the ways that the Sieur de la Salle made himself so unpopular a century and a half later was to force himself on some of the younger and more handsome of his men, for which he is hotly taken to task in a letter from his engineer. With admittedly some trepidation at doing this in a decidedly "red" state, I have restored this lavender nuance to the many hues of Texas history.

I was equally surprised at finding a number of original sources that had been overlooked in compiling the previous omnibus historiesãdiaries and letters that have added considerable accent and detail to a history that has become really a bit formulaic and staid.Ý Perhaps I shouldn¼t admit this, but when I ran across someone that struck me as particularly interesting, I consulted the indexes of the previous general works, and if he (and often she) was not there, I made some effort to enlarge the recited canon with some new faces and experiences. Benjamin Lundy, for instance, was a Quaker abolitionist who attempted to start a colony for freed American slaves in Mexican Texas.Ý He was so scalded by his failure that he formed an alliance with Massachusetts representative and former president John Quincy Adams, and was probably the largest single reason that it took ten years for the Republic of Texas to engineer its way into the Union. I remain incredulous that he has been given such short shrift in other histories.

The most FAQ so far is about the title. Frankly, after the past few years saw a proliferation of books with titles trying to tag onto Fehrenbach (Lone Star Nation, Lone Star Rising, Lone Star What-Have-You) it was impossible to call it Lone Star anything.Ý Books with Texas in the title were equally prevalent.Ý On other business, however, I was reading Steinbeck¼s Travels with Charlie, in which he wrote that "Texas, like most passionate nations, has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts." This captures the tone I strive for in the bookãgood history, but with the tongue a little bit in cheek, and with a nod to the myths as well as the factsãand in fact I use the Steinbeck quote as an epigraph.

Because it is somewhat idiosyncratic, my editor has warned me that academics probably won¼t like it, but he didn¼t care, because people will like it and it should stay in print for years.Ý So, while I am braced for some critical brickbats from the Ph.D. crowd, the first few reviews to come in (see below) have been extremely gratifying.

If you would like to purchase an autographed copy, just write or email me. It will cost you $35, shipping included.

PASSIONATE NATION Reviews

Publishers Weekly: Texas native Haley (Sam Houston) does an outstanding job of narrating the outsized and dramatic history of the Lone Star State... ÝHaley takes pains to separate folklore from fact... [and] goes beyond the basic themes of Texas history - politics, finance, civil rights and natural disasters - to study the dusty byroads of Texas culture...Ý With this rich and entertaining history, Haley adds his name, indelibly, to the list of native writers his state should be rightfully proud of.

Kirkus Reviews: Texas history, like just about any other, is marked by misunderstanding and violenceãbut in Texas, naturally, everything's bigger.

The first Europeans looking for gold to arrive in what is now Texas... had a vague notion they were in Mexico, and found out otherwise when they wrecked on or near Galveston Island.Ý The Karankawa Indians they met were occasional cannibals who ate only enemies; when they learned that the shipwrecked survivors ate their own merely to fend off starvation, the "declared that if they had known the Spanish were capable of such an abomination, they would have been slaughtered on the beach."Ý There's lots of slaughtering in Haley's pages. For instance, he offers a lucid, careful exposition of the siege of the Alamo, in which he avoids hero worship and iconoclasm alike while addressing questions that have occupied generations of Texas scholars.

Haley charts the course of progressive politics in Texas through the careers of Lyndon Johnson, Barbara Jordan and other civil-rights pioneers, and then the pendulum swings hard right with George W. Bush.Ý Haley seems not to be a fan of the last, but he is harder on Bush's predecessor as governor, Ann Richards...

Haley's highly readable book complements but does not replace Randolph B. Campbell's more idea-driven Gone to Texas (2003), and it nicely updates T.R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star, the standard overview.

Austin American Statesman: A masterwork that easily replaces Fehrenbach's Lone Star as the best non-academic history of Texas.

Houston Chronicle: This bold step into a dense new history of Texas is well-informed, erudite and astonishingly comprehensive... But this is no metronomic trek through time. Haley spends out his Texas tale more as a folksy romp, replete with humorous asides, ironic commentary and sometimes uproarious and nearly forgotten anecdotes; it's a slow but rich read, intellectually rewarding and highly entertaining.

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