One book that captures this rough tumult with all its cacophony is Sam W. Haynes' "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic; The Struggle for Texas," due out from Basic Books on May 3.

By the mid-1840s, Republic of Texas president Sam Houston helped revived the annexation issue by making it known to the United States that Texas could form an alliance with Great Britain, Haynes said.

In cinematic prose, Sam Haynes’s Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas (Basic Books) tells the story of Texas’s origins as a multi-ethnic, cultural mélange of ...