Country of the Cursed and the Driven
eBook - ePub

Country of the Cursed and the Driven

Slavery and the Texas Borderlands

  1. 570 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Country of the Cursed and the Driven

Slavery and the Texas Borderlands

About this book

Winner of the 2022 W. Turrentine Jackson Award
Winner of the 2022 David J. Weber Prize


In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Texas—a hotly contested land where states wielded little to no real power—local alliances and controversies, face-to-face relationships, and kin ties structured personal dynamics and cross-communal concerns alike. Country of the Cursed and the Driven brings readers into this world through a sweeping analysis of Hispanic, Comanche, and Anglo-American slaving regimes, illuminating how slaving violence, in its capacity to bolster and shatter families and entire communities, became both the foundation and the scourge, the panacea and the curse, of life in the borderlands.

As scholars have begun to assert more forcefully over the past two decades, slavery was much more diverse and widespread in North America than previously recognized, engulfing the lives of Native, European, and African descended people across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. Paul Barba details the rise of Texas’s slaving regimes, spotlighting the ubiquitous, if uneven and evolving, influences of colonialism and anti-Blackness. 

By weaving together and reframing traditionally disparate historical narratives, Country of the Cursed and the Driven challenges the common assumption that slavery was insignificant to the history of Texas prior to Anglo American colonization, arguing instead that the slavery imported by Stephen F. Austin and his colonial followers in the 1820s found a comfortable home in the slavery-stained borderlands, where for decades Spanish colonists and their Comanche neighbors had already unleashed waves of slaving devastation.  

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Yes, you can access Country of the Cursed and the Driven by Paul Barba in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Maps and Tables
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction. “Cursed and Driven, Traded, as Slaves . . . O, What a Country”
  10. Part I: Slave Raiders and Their Cycles of Violence, 1500S–1760S
  11. Part II: Strange and Violent Bedfellows, 1760S–1836
  12. Part III: Violent Confluences in the Age of Anglo-Slaving Supremacy, 1836–1860
  13. Epilogue. “A Malady without Cure”
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. Series List