Presents an account of the Mexican War, providing an analysis of its cause, battles, weapons, and outcome.

The definitive history of the often forgotten U.S.-Mexican War paints an intimate portrait of the major players and their world—from Indian fights and Manifest Destiny, to secret military maneuvers, gunshot wounds, and political spin. “If one can read only a single book about the Mexican-American War, this is the one to read.” —The New York Review of Books Often overlooked, the U.S.-Mexican War featured false starts, atrocities, and daring back-channel negotiations as it divided the nation, paved the way for the Civil War a generation later, and launched the career of Abraham Lincoln. Amy S. Greenberg’s skilled storytelling and rigorous scholarship bring this American war for empire to life with memorable characters, plotlines, and legacies. Along the way it captures a young Lincoln mismatching his clothes, the lasting influence of the Founding Fathers, the birth of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and America’s first national antiwar movement. A key chapter in the creation of the United States, it is the story of a burgeoning nation and an unforgettable conflict that has shaped American history.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico was the most remarkable military expedition in history, and in achieving it, Hernan Cortes proved himself as one of the greatest generals of all time. This book explains the background of the Aztec Empire and of the Spanish presence in Mexico. It describes the lives of the Aztecs in their glittering capital and of the Europeans who learned to adapt and survive in an alien and often dangerous world. The invasion was a war between civilizations, pitting the fatalism and obsessive ritual of the Aztecs against soldiers fighting for riches, their lives, and eventually their souls.

By 1926 the Mexican government of Plutarco Elías Calles had sparked widespread discontent with its radical social policies. Plots to overthrow the administration ran rampant. One of the strangest conspiracies arose within a clique of exiled Mexican military officers . . . in Hollywood. Bill Mills takes readers inside the forgotten story of General Enrique Estrada and his Southern California army. Secretly gathering recruits from city barrios and Imperial Valley farms, Estrada and his staff of ex-generals not only built an invasion force but stockpiled an arsenal of small arms to supply it. Attempts to acquire armored vehicles and airplanes had moved forward when law enforcement got wind of the clandestine military activity. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly reorganized under J. Edgar Hoover, assigned a four-man team to unravel the plot. Racing against time, the agents pitted old-school legwork against Estrada’s determination and, as the day of the invasion arrived, confronted the general’s caravan fewer than ten miles from the Mexican border. Packed with intrigue, The Estrada Plot is the unlikely true crime drama of how the early FBI foiled an invasion from within the United States.

Orphaned just years after his birth, and cast into life with a negligent uncle, Benito Juarez seemed destined to live his life as a humble shepherd in a tiny village outside of Oaxaca, Mexico. But young Benito had a passion for learning, and a desire to achieve more. This ambition led him to study to join the clergy, and then into law school. But soon the revolution sweeping across his country led the humble lawyer from a governorship in Oaxaca to an exile in New Orleans, and then back to Mexico, where he became the country's first Indian president. But Juarez's struggles didn't end there. Soon after coming to power, Juarez confronted power-hungry generals within his own country, and the invading influence of Napoleon III, who hoped to make Mexico part of his global empire, ruled over by the installed emperor, Maximilian Hapsburg. Juarez alone, a man who grew up in poverty as part of one of Mexico's oppressed peoples, stood up to the French Empire and reclaimed Mexico for its people. Book jacket.

A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

Humberto Garza provides the reader with historical facts, discrepancies, and vital information that previously have been blatantly omitted, through error or intentionality, from our history textbooks as to the factors leading to the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. He uses references, footnotes, and numerous direct quotes to provide the reader with a unique perspective of a series of intriguing events that dramatically altered the course of two nations; and today both nations continue to live with the residual aftereffects. Garza asks intriguing questions: Why were historical figures such as Commodore Stockton, Commodore Sloat, Consul Thomas O. Larkin, and Brigadier General Kearny securing for the United States all of Mexico's territories (Alta California, Nuevo Mexico, and the Southwest) in July 1846, only two months after Congress authorized President Polk "to join an existing war"? How did they know the Mexican-American War had started? The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to end the war was signed on February 2, 1848, almost 2 years later, how did they know the outcome of the war and the terms of the treaty to cede territory? Garza presents a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the real causes of the Mexican American War. He courageously questions the validity of many American historians' assertions as they relate to the causes leading to this war. His research reexamines the United States' reasons for invading Mexico and what really happened at the Thornton Skirmish. He also closely reexamines relevant maps and explains their discrepancies in relation to the "disputed territory" in Texas, the Thornton Skirmish, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.