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The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly 200 years later, the Rangers are still going, one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. Countless movies, television shows, and pulp novels have celebrated the Rangers as Wild West supermen. In many cases, they deserve their plaudits. But often the truth has been obliterated.   

In CULT OF GLORY: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers (Viking) Doug J. Swanson does justice to the Rangers\\u2019 heroic moments while also showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors and for officially sanctioned violence. He demonstrates how the Rangers and their supporters have operated a propaganda machine that turned agency disasters and misdeeds into fables of triumph, transformed murderous rampages--including the killing of scores of Mexican civilians--into valorous feats, and elevated scoundrels to sainthood. This book documents, for the first time, the Rangers\\u2019 efforts to suppress the NAACP in Texas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Doug J. Swanson was for many years an investigative reporter at the Dallas Morning News. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, and a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Swanson currently teaches journalism in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. His previous nonfiction book, Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster who Created Vegas Poker, was published by Viking in 2014. Swanson spent five years researching and writing Cult of Glory, much of it in the Texas state archives. Some of the records he used have never been published.