"This is the book we desperately need on the Texas Revolution. Unsettled Land shows Texas as it was, not as it has appeared on the set of The Alamo. Haynes' Texas was a multiracial society, where free African Americans became prominent merchants, and where white land speculators staged revolts with Indigenous allies. For the likes of Sam Houston and Stephen Austin, the Texas Revolution promised freedom from Mexican rule. But for the Indigenous peoples and African Americans who had forged lives in Mexican-era Texas, independence signaled a loss of freedom. With gripping prose, Haynes captures both the drama and the complexity of the Mexican province that would eventually become the Lone Star State."–Alice L. Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom
