Book Reviews
of the Medina Arredondo brutally murdered 327 citizens of
San Antonio.
The second group of readers will be those with a little
knowledge of Texas history. They will be uncertain as to what
is fact and what is not. They may wonder whether Bullard and
Toledo are real and whether Jess Leeman and Ben Marsten
are unreal. Many of these readers will want to know. One good
source of information is Dr. Julia Kathryn Garrett's Green
Flag Over Texas.
The third group, those who have an adequate grasp of Texas
history, will enjoy the book most. They will appreciate the
skill and the charm with which the author has blended the
two ingredients, historical fact and delightful fiction.
PAT IRELAND NIXON
San Antonio, Texas
George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel. By Russel B. Nye. New York
(Alfred A. Knopf). Pp. 340. 1944. $3.50
This is biography, biography as it should be written.
George Bancroft is remembered nowadays - when he is re-
membered - as a flamboyant and outmoded Writer of history,
the sort of history our grandfathers and great-grandfathers
read and believed and used in Fourth of July orations. To this
generation Bancroft has been one of the New England patriarchs
whose portrait belongs in the familiar panel with the bearded
faces of Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell. Some may hazily
recall that he was a Massachusetts politician on the wrong,
i.e., Democratic, side. Not many have known what sort of
man he was or what he did when he was not at work on those
stout volumes of the History; but everyone who has read even
a portion of the History must have wondered.
Mr. Nye's study answers the question: Bancroft was all
sorts of a man. Son of a pioneer Unitarian minister, grandson
of an American Tory; Harvard honor man at seventeen; Got-
tingen Ph.D. at twenty; he had visited Goethe, Humboldt,
LaFayette, Byron, and the other early nineteenth century no-
tables and seen Europe through bifurcated spectacles - one
lens New England puritanism, the other German liberalism -
before he returned, with continental beard and affected man-
nerisms, to institute German thoroughness in tutoring Greek at
Ha'rvard. One season was enough, for him and for Harvard;
307
Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945. Austin, Texas. The Portal to Texas History. http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146055/. Accessed May 22, 2013.
