"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)