Books like The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense

A rather typical history of the Texas Rangers written by a young historian in the mid-1930's. More a telling of the Ranger's exploits in war and law-enforcement instead of a scholarly examination of the organization's political/legal development and the role that it played in the social structure of early Texas (good and bad such as dealings with slaves, freed slaves, Mexicans and native Americans). As was common of these type of histories from the mid-twentieth century Mr. Webb is a flag waver and unabashedly partisan. Also, equally typical of works from the time period (unfortunately), there is casual racism that I'm sure Mr. Webb was unaware of. Many of his readers would have accepted some of his statements as just a matter of fact in 1935. In defense of Mr. Webb his later works showed that he had changed - as do most of us as we mature. Mr. Webb had plans to do some editing to this book before it was re-released in 1965 and ,I suspect, among those changes would have been some judicious editing of some of the more inflammatory sentences. I also suspect that he would have provided more material on the role that the Texas Rangers played during the post-Reconstruction Era (which is basically ignored in the book). However Mr. Webb was killed in a car crash in 1963 so the original publication remains unchanged. I always state that one needs to keep perspective when reading an older book, but often it seems to fall on deaf ears. Nevertheless try to keep that in mind when reading this history.