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Until Carl H. Moneyhon’s Texas After the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction appeared in 2004, twenty-first-century Texas had no objective general history of Reconstruction . Numerous theses, dissertations, monographs, and books produced over the past three decades attempted to explain various facets of the postwar experience, but none surveyed the composite picture. Three historiographical essays provided guidance : Edgar P. Sneed, “A Historiography of Reconstruction in Texas: Some Myths and Problems,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 72 (April 1969), pp. 435–448; Merline Pitre, “A Note on the Historiography of Blacks in the Reconstruction of Texas,” Journal of Negro History 66 (Winter 1981), pp. 340–348; and Barry A. Crouch, “‘Unmanacling ’ Texas Reconstruction: A Twenty-Year Perspective,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 93 (January 1990), pp. 275–302. In addition, overviews in collected editions have furnished insight into Reconstruction Texas. Ralph A. Wooster, in “The Civil War and Reconstruction in Texas,” which appeared in A Guide to the History of Texas, edited by Light Townsend Cummins and Alvin R. Bailey Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 37–50, discusses considerable material but is not comprehensive. Randolph B. Campbell has attempted to interpret the Reconstruction era as part of a three-decade continuum, in “Statehood , Civil War, and Reconstruction, 1846–76,” in Texas Through Time: Evolving Interpretations , edited by Walter L. Buenger and Robert A. Calvert (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), pp. 165–196. Campbell has been a prolific Reconstruction scholar. His work Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1876 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), focuses upon six Texas counties (the essays previously appeared in different historical journals), attempting to explain Texas after the war. The State Police are only briefly mentioned. His accounts, however, of local personnel have supplied historians of Texas with valuable information about who appointed them and their background. Campbell’s “Carpetbagger Rule in Reconstruction Texas: An Enduring Myth,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 97 (April 1994), pp. 587–596, convincingly demonstrates that this group of interlopers had minimal influence in postwar Texas. Campbell’s investigation of district judges and local politicos is also important for understanding the State Police and their activities. See especially “The District Judges of Texas in 1866–1867: An Episode in the Failure of Presidential Reconstruction ,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 93 (January 1990), pp. 357–377; “Grass Roots Reconstruction: The Personnel of County Government in Texas, 1865–1876,” Journal E<

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