Texas Revolution

"Only a scholar as familiar with the Texas Revolution as Professor Binkley could have written this slim volume; anyone else would have used four times the space to tell the same story. Writing against the rich background gained by a quarter century of study, he has produced four connected essays--originally delivered as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University--which offer the best interpretation of the Texan struggle for independence yet to appear. His achievement is the more remarkable in that he makes no pretence of either offering new materials or writing the entire history of the revolution. Instead, his contribution is to draw new meaning from familiar monographic studies and to give logical order to a sequence of events that have remained chaotic in the hands of many earlier historians."--Ray Allen Billington, Journal of American History (December 1952)

William Campbell Binkley, historian and teacher, was born on April 30, 1889, at Newbern, Tennessee. He studied history at the University of California, where he received a B.A. (1917), an M.A. (1918), and a Ph.D. (1920). Binkley began teaching history at Colorado College in 1921 and became a full professor in 1925. He was a student of the history of the West and the frontier, but his special interest was Texas history. From 1930 to 1953 he was professor and chairman of the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. In 1953 he was named professor of history at Tulane University and editor of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, positions he held until his retirement in 1963; he was given an honorary LL.D. degree by Tulane in 1964.