Mexican-American War Research Articles

Hegemonic Nationalism, Subordinate Marxism: The Mexican Left, 1945–7

AbstractThe most significant weakness of the Marxist Left in early Cold War Mexico was that it subordinated itself to post-revolutionary nationalism. Both the Mexican Communist Party and followers of Vicente Lombardo Toledano supported the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), avoiding significant criticism before late 1947. Some dissident currents of Marxism did exist, but they were sparsely followed. Mexico provides an extreme case of Left subordination to popular-nationalist ideology, yet is indicative of trends visible elsewhere, e.g. among Marxist groups in post-war Cuba and the United States. Rather than promoting notions of communist political practice, the Mexican Marxist Left consistently advocated the elimination of class conflict and support for the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The Marxist Left held the Mexican government to different standards from those to which they held the governments of other countries. A near-consensus on the Mexican Left equated patriotism with progressive politics. The argument is illustrated with an important case study: the 1947 Marxist Round Table.

Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe

Reviewed by: Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by John Wharton Lowe Matthew Teutsch John Wharton Lowe. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016. 464pp. $95.00 cloth/$39.95 paper. Constructing the South through a circum-Caribbean lens, John Lowe’s Calypso Magnolia calls us to expand our definitions of the South and Southern literature in much the same way that scholars such as Michael Bibler, R. Scott Heath, and others proposed in “Adjust Your Maps: Manifestos from, for, and about United States Southern Studies” in a recent issue of PMLA. Lowe’s study is “mindful of the complex history that has shaped and reshaped the circum-Caribbean and how the invention of national units has obscured a conception of a cultural and geographical region,” and he highlights the crosscurrents that bind the Caribbean, southern United States, and Mexico together in one contiguous region made up of varying [End Page 331] intersecting cultures (7). To trace this “complex history,” Lowe examines a wide range of texts spanning almost two hundred years and multiple geographic locales. Through discussion of the “tropical sublime,” Lowe highlights the ways that writers from the contiguous U. S. Southern states wrote about their experiences and encounters with the Caribbean and Mexico during the Mexican-American War and its aftermath. Serving as a crucial event in regards to the relationship between the circum-Caribbean and the U. S. South, the Mexican-American War provided the nation with texts that presented Mexico and the Caribbean as “feminized in order to be ‘taken’ by her northern lover, the United States” in order to expand plantation slavery into new regions (21). The intersections with Southern ports, particularly New Orleans and its Spanish and French cultural history, prepared soldiers for their experiences during the war in Mexico and beyond. In his examination of Raphael Semmes’s and Arthur Manigault’s military/travel memoirs during the Mexican-American War and William Clark Falkner’s The Spanish Heroine (1851), Lowe shows how the war exposed Southerners to Caribbean culture. Semmes, Manigault, and Falkner all present the Caribbean and Mexico as spaces that must be tamed and “civilized”; however, as Lowe points out, the war also led to “a massive intercultural dialectic” between the regions (56). This is the most important aspect that leads us to an understanding of what Lowe terms the “South of the South,” an exchange of cultures across constructed nationalistic boundaries. During the nineteenth century, Cuba, an island only about ninety miles off the coast of Florida, had long existed as a site where Southern slaveholders and others sought to extend the boundaries of the United States. Thomas Jefferson even claimed that it would make a great addition to the nation. However, the island also served as a space for possible revolution and insurrection against racial injustice and the institution of slavery. As such, Lowe explores these two aspects in regards to the “Cuban imaginary” by looking at Lucy Holcomb Pickens’s 1854 novel The Free Flag of Cuba and Martin Delany’s 1859 serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba. Deftly, Lowe uses Pickens’s and Delany’s novels to highlight the historical milieu leading up to the Civil War and to show how even someone like Delany can fall prey to becoming a colonizer. However, this does not diminish the fact that Delany’s text worked as a plow to plant the seeds of revolt in the South through its hemispheric representations of slavery. While the nineteenth century saw Cuba as a space for expansion and/or revolution, Lowe concludes Calypso Magnolia with an examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cuban American writers such as Virgil Suarez, Roberto Fernández, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Christina García, and others as they seek to reconstruct Cuba as a homeland while living in exile. Here, Lowe looks at the works in relation to the sentiment of the “lost cause” that U. S. Southerners had after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century. Like the U. S. South, texts by authors...

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

Reviewed by: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp Brian Schoen (bio) This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.95.) Not that long ago scholars portrayed antebellum southern planter-politicians as parochial, keen on walling themselves off from the changing world. Even as intellectual and economic historians chipped away at the image of a culturally isolated, anticapitalist South, political historians [End Page 660] continued to study their actors chiefly within their plantation kingdoms, state legislatures, or as combatants in an increasingly raucous national political arena. Starting in the late aughts, however, historians thrust southern statesmen onto the world political stage. Building on the pioneering work of Robert E. May's The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (1973) and more fully developed nineteenth-century global histories, Edward Bartlett Rugemer's The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), Matthew Pratt Guterl's American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008), and Robert E. Bonner's Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (2009) highlight the challenges of navigating slavery through rocky waters. My own (bias alert) The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009) stresses the power that slaveholders perceived cotton gave them as they did battle in the global arena. Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire draws deeply from this scholarship, while moving beyond it to demonstrate just how crucial southern politicians were in directing federal policy toward what he calls a "proslavery internationalism" (4). This densely researched, carefully argued, and artfully written book persuasively shows that the South's politicians were often at the helm of the federal government's core military and diplomatic apparatus during the late antebellum period. Karp reminds us of their outsized influence by showing that southerners held nearly 80 percent of the secretaryships of war and the navy. From 1847 to 1861, they also dominated the House and Senate Committees on Naval and Military Affairs, providing a majority of the committee appointments and controlling the leadership in 73 percent of the sessions. Southern influence over the War Department, from John C. Calhoun through Jefferson Davis and to John Floyd, has been long known. Karp will surprise many readers by showing that less well known southerners like Abel Upshur, John Y. Mason, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Thomas Butler King, and Stephen Mallory dominated U.S. naval policy. Nor in Karp's telling were these small government-types. Instead—like Max M. Edling in A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (2014)—he sees this era and these men as expanding and modernizing federal power, from gunboats to artillery to administrative systems. Though southern leaders were divided over the pursuit of territorial expansion, their single-minded desire to preserve slavery at home and abroad led them to expand American federal influence on land and at sea in the Caribbean Rim and South Atlantic. Far from fatalistic or recoiling at the modern arc of history, southern slaveholders applied strength to [End Page 661] bend it toward their will, believing that "slavery and progress had proved impressively congruent" (169). Situating this story within the broader contours of global, national, and sectional political narratives is tricky business, but Karp proves up to the task. He offers nuanced examinations of singular moments, such as Henry Wise's tempestuous time as minister to Brazil, and of major events, including Texas's annexation and the Mexican-American War. He moves adeptly from the halls of Congress to cabinet deliberations to, when necessary, the broader public debates over American foreign policy. His argument that southerners' concern about slavery's stability in Cuba, Texas, and Brazil likely outpaced their desire for territorial aggrandizement is particularly noteworthy. In a few places Karp's emphasis stretches beyond the evidence. Southerners may have agreed that "the record of U.S. foreign policy in this period forms little more than a chronicle of anxieties about Cuban slave emancipation" (61). Nationally, however, there were many...

Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynnby

Reviewed by: Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynnby Cameron Shriver Native American Almanac: More Than 5,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous People. By Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenberger Flynn. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2016. vi + 625 pp. Illustrations, index. $24.95 paper. In this reference work, the authors “have tried to present a historical overview of Native communities in what is now the United States” (ix). The book is intended for a lay audience, and to that end Dennis, Hirschfelder, and Flynn have broken their subject into regional chapters with many concise sections. For example, the Northern Plains chapter has information on “From the Woodlands to the Plains,” “Traditional Life” (Cultural Expressions, Drama, Literature, Technology, Games and Sports), “Colonial History,” “Selling Energy,” “Contemporary Concerns” (in which the Black Hills, Cobell Settlement, and Keystone XL Pipeline garner abstracts), and summaries of many tribes in the region. Each regional chapter includes a valuable series of short biographies of important people, arranged chronologically. These describe both a long past and a vibrant present, incorporating recent figures such as Gyasi Ross and Shoni Schimmel. As a single volume designed for the uninitiated, the book is well illustrated and has a bounty of biographical information. Additionally, it introduces a broad array of current Indian Country issues. Unfortunately, it also has too many errors of fact. Despite the authors’ assertion, the French did develop “permanent settlements in the interior” of Canada (4). The 1795 Treaty of Greenville did not relinquish “all of present-day Ohio” (10). The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma was not terminated in 1897, nor did they have a “longhouse culture” that was revitalized by oil revenues (242–43). While the community that became the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma was forcibly removed from Ohio to Oklahoma in 1832, it was a fraction of the 50,000 the authors claim (245). Matters of emphasis compound these missteps. For example, the authors narrate the Mexican-American War (1846–48) without discussing the many Native people vying for power in the Southern Plains. This is a lost opportunity because recent historical work has illuminated the ways in which Indian polities—Comanches, Apaches, and others—were central to the causes and course of that conflict. The short section on colonial history of the Northern Plains is essentially a description of nineteenth-century epidemics among the Mandan. What of Lakota [End Page 242] expansion? The authors argue that most modern Northern Plains nations were pushed from the east by European expansion and Native forces. Yet whether Algonquian and Sioux communities were pushed or pulled to the Northern Plains is disputed. Native American Almanac is surefooted in its goal of providing an overview of modern topics of interest for those without prior knowledge. Readers familiar with Native American scholarship may prefer the encyclopedic Handbook of North American Indians series, including its two-volume “Plains” edition edited by Raymond DeMallie. The authors of Native American Almanac likewise employ a regional approach and, also like the Handbook, include a history of Indian-white relations. For those interested in specific events, communities, or historical processes, I recommend looking elsewhere. Cameron Shriver Postdoctoral Research Associate Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon

Reviewed by: Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon Graham B. Cox Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution. Edited by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon. Introduction by Gregg Cantrel. College Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2015. vii + 169 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. $30.00 cloth. For students of Texas history, Contested Empire offers a look into some of the newest scholarship on the revolutionary period. Edited by Sam Haynes and Gerald Saxon, accomplished Texas historians in their own right, this book contains five unique assessments of the revolution. Greg Cantrell’s introduction deserves special mention as well for its excellent discussion on the ways in which historians have treated Texas history and the revolution in particular. Eric Schlereth, in his “Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution,” examines the apparent ease with which Mexicans and Anglo-Americans changed allegiances in leaving their country of origin, joining Mexico and shifting their support to the rebellion and the new republic. Using this concept of “voluntary allegiance,” Schlereth reveals that “patriotism was transferrable” and, therefore, the revolution and its outcome was a “deeply contingent” event. These ideas, of course, are quite resonant today. In his “‘Imitating the Example of our Forefathers’: The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment,” Sam W. Haynes focuses on the revolutionary motives of Anglo-Texans and reveals the degree to which collective memory of the American revolutionary experience guided actions. Particularly helpful in understanding the intellectual connectivity of the Texas experience with that of American history, Haynes delivers an excellent (if all too brief by necessity) recitation of America’s “creation narrative.” Haynes succeeds in not only demonstrating how Texans connected to the American experience but also how rapidly they disassociated themselves almost immediately by fashioning a unique “Texas creation narrative,” which has tended to obscure, as Haynes put it, the degree to which Anglo-Texans “had once been, in a very real sense, re-enactors of the American Revolution.” Miguel Soto reveals the importance of land speculation, particularly that of Mexican speculators, in bringing about the Texas Revolution in his “Politics and Profits: Mexican Officials and Land Speculation in Texas, 1824–1835.” The course and character of land grants after the Mexican Revolution from Spain had produced a minority of Spanish and Mexicans in Texas; according to Soto, this was “a decisive factor in the outcome,” suggesting that “Mexican sovereignty over Texas” may have “already been compromised long before” what happened at San Jacinto. Will Fowler in his “The Texan Revolution of 1835–1836 and Early Mexican Nationalism,” like Soto, evaluates the revolution from a Mexican perspective. By examining period writings, Fowler argues that the Mexican national consciousness that grew in the post-1848 period owed its underpinnings to the earlier revolutionary period. This “early vision of Mexicanidad,” according to Fowler, emphasized a collective Hispanic heritage, Catholicism, abolitionism, spiritualism over materialism, and distrust of the United States (and land-grabbing Americans). As Fowler shows, although Mexican national identity took time to grow, it did not appear out of whole cloth during the Mexican-American War era; it was already present, at least among Mexican intellectuals in the Texas revolutionary period. While acknowledging the importance of slavery in the debate over American annexation [End Page 70] of Texas, Amy Greenburg in her “‘Time’s Noblest Empires Is the Last’: Texas Annexation in the Presumed Course of American Empire” takes a broader view and submits that some Americans were concerned “that annexation of Texas would lead to the internal collapse of the United States.” Using Thomas Cole’s series of 1836 allegorical paintings of the five stages of empire, Greenburg certainly succeeds in what she proposed for her essay, letting Cole’s The Course of Empire “weave the web of the story.” By doing so, Greenburg reminds us that the debate over annexation of Texas was part of a larger discourse on American empire. This book represents the printed version of the forty-eighth annual Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures held at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013. Each chapter examines Texas history from more modern perspectives, which reflect recent trends in history—transnational, cultural, and...

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears

Reviewed by: Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears Ana Stevenson ARRESTING DRESS: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. By Clare Sears. Durham: Duke University Press. 2015. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco is a compelling new work which explores the criminalization of this form of gendered expression. Clare Sears is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Her research specializations include critical criminology theory, sexuality and gender studies (especially queer theory and transgender studies), and the history of California. Arresting Dress is the first detailed investigation of late-nineteenth-century cross-dressing law in a single American city. While San Francisco was only one of the thirty-four cities to enact such laws between 1848 and 1900, it constitutes a particularly productive site for "the production and policing of normative gender in relation to broader societal trends." Sears uses these laws to understand how normative definitions of gender, race, and ability were shaped by societal changes relating to manifest destiny and territorial expansion, chattel slavery and race, immigration and the nation, as well as emerging issues of morality, difference, and citizenship (4-5). Methodologically, this work is shaped by queer and transgender studies, gender history, and urban studies, as well as critical legal and critical race studies. In focusing on the "historical production and subsequent operations of the boundary between normative and nonnormative gender," Sears emphasizes the scholarly utility of bringing together "a range of cross-gender phenomena" historically marked as both transgressive and acceptable. Sears suggests a new framework—trans-ing analysis—for examining the "political significance of attempts to produce and police normative gender boundaries through cross-dressing laws." In the process, Sears seeks to draw attention away from the figure of the cross-dresser and toward practices of cross-dressing (7-8). Charting the 15 years prior to the criminalization of cross-dressing in San Francisco, Chapter One ponders its meaning on the Californian frontier. During the social upheaval and changing demographics of the Mexican-American War and the gold rush, cross-dressing [End Page 227] recreations flourished amongst miners. But these practices were not necessarily transgressive, Sears suggests, for they supported a "temporary fantasy of binary gender" which facilitated racialized heteronormativity (31). Following this period of lax governance, new municipal laws sought to regulate a number of practices earlier tolerated. Chapter Two examines how shifting attitudes toward what constituted indecency came to be enacted in law. Cross-dressing and prostitution were connected conceptually and materially—"as two sides of the same gender-transgressive coin," but also in midcentury sex workers' symbolic self-presentation (43). In 1863, to address these new public anxieties, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors criminalized cross-dressing by prohibiting "a person from appearing in public in 'a dress not belonging to his or her sex'" (42). But was cross-dressing law ever enforced? As Chapter Three demonstrates, San Francisco police made 100 arrests before the turn of the twentieth century (62). The "problem bodies" which contravened expectations about sexuality, race, disability, and public space were targeted, whereas charges against women who could prove their wealth and respectability were routinely dropped. Chapter Four describes the voyeuristic surveillance needed to maintain binary gender at the level of clothing, interrogating the invasiveness of police photography and the spectacle of the court trial. However, in "framing white cross-dressing subjects as criminal nuisances and queer freaks" while ignoring the offences of racial minorities, Sears argues, the law "established the production of normative gender as the prerogative of whites and drained gender variance from Chinese and Mexican communities" (81, 93). In light of this conclusion, it is surprising that the case of mestiz@ Elvira Mugarrieta/Babe Bean/Jack Garland is mentioned only in passing (110). Chapter Five considers the paradox of the late-nineteenth-century popular entertainments which featured cross-dressing. From vaudevillian theatre and dime museum sideshows to commercial tours of San Francisco's "underworld," these entertainments celebrated gender transformation. This existed in direct contrast with the legal construction of cross-dressers as criminal nuisances (97). Chapter Six interrogates how racialized gender normativity became...

Law, Allegiance, and Sovereignty in Civil War Mexico, 1857–1867

This essay explores the ways in which, during the turbulent decade of 1857–1867, the bonds between the Mexican state and its citizens were refashioned, in the midst of a constitutional overhaul, the establishment of a monarchical regime, civil war and a foreign invasion. It focuses on how rival governments conceived and implemented the laws that were to constitute political community, ensure loyalty, mobilize men and resources, and demarcate civil and religious jurisdiction. It examines how citizens navigated the ambiguities of the laws of war, and the ways in which the triumphant Republicans used them to punish, exclude and delegitimize their former rivals, but also to reconcile a divided nation.

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War, by John C. Pinheiro

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican–American War, by John C. Pinheiro

Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution

Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution

Physicians of the Bear-Flag Republic.

In the mid-nineteenth century, three events coincided to make California the 31st state of the USA: The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, The Bear Flag Revolt of 1846 and the discovery of gold in 1848. Within a few years a population explosion had occurred and with it came the need for organization of the practice of medicine. This paper outlines the biographies of some physicians who were instrumental in the early years of the Golden State.

The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

This important historical study contributes to rescuing Latin America from the margins to which the dominant historiography on modern democracy relegated it, placing the region at the center of the development of political modernity worldwide. Based on the claim that nowhere else in the world was democratic republicanism embraced in such a wide manner during the mid-nineteenth century, Sanders establishes that the New World was truly at the vanguard of modern political culture at the time. He focuses, in particular, on an intriguing aspect of political culture—namely, the emergence of what he terms “American republican modernity” (4 and introd.), exploring its rise, relative significance, and eventual collapse late in the century.The book, which for lack of a better word could be considered a “connective” rather than comparative history, mainly focuses on Colombia and Mexico, the two Spanish American regions where in Sanders’s opinion republican modernity operated more strongly. However, the study also takes in Uruguay and Cuba and makes significant references to Chilean political thought and discourse. Instead of addressing modernity as a tangible or “measurable” reality in these various places, Sanders emphasizes its discursive character, insisting also on its fluid and competing nature. Though it competed with alternative visions or “currents of modernity” (21), republican modernity in places like Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, and even Cuba was, he contends, a forceful mind-set in everyday political thought and discourse, predominantly reflected in the journalistic public sphere. The more than 120 newspapers referenced in this study (over half of them published in Mexico) were consumed avidly by not only the highly educated but also, in general, the masses, who absorbed modern republican ideas in the streets, in taverns, at cockfights, during national celebrations, and so forth.The study is arranged thematically and presented in narrative case studies and in analytic chapters with abundant comparative references. The narrative chapters center on significant historical episodes. Chapter 1, for instance, examines the experiences and mind-set of Garibaldinos, the foreign soldiers (Italian, French, and Basque) who fought in Uruguay’s international and civil war, the Guerra Grande (1839–51), under Giuseppe Garibaldi. Their ideas and those of Afro-Uruguayan combatants symbolize the rapid growth of modern republican discourse, including principles such as fraternity among all peoples, support for freedom and the abolition of slavery, and the belief that civilization was tied to liberty and republicanism. Chapter 3, another narrative part of the book, addresses republican discourses related to the experience of Mexico’s St. Patricio battalion, which fought against General Zachary Taylor’s troops during the US-Mexican War (1846–48). Made up not only of Mexican nationals but also of several Irish, defectors from the US army, the group fought bloody battles against the American invaders, whom they regarded as uncivilized racists incapable of true republicanism. This was part of the wider disappointment Mexican republicans felt toward the United States, whose attitudes were deemed contrary to universal liberty, equality, fraternity, and humanity. Chapters 5 and 6 provide additional narratives (on the life and thought of Chilean liberal Francisco Bilbao and the career of a Colombian soldier) illustrative of the spirit characteristic of American republican modernity.The analytic portions of the book address tensions surrounding discourses on republican modernity, including Europhile inclinations dominating discourses on cultural modernity among Latin American intellectuals before the midcentury; the flourishing and impact of an animated democratic culture and of republican political modernity on society, even subaltern sectors that appropriated relevant discourses, from the 1840s to the 1860s; and the collapse of American republican modernity from the 1870s to the 1890s, when Western industrial modernity took over elite values and mind-sets. Still, Sanders establishes that as elites abandoned American republican modernity, subaltern sectors continued to demand that the principles of republicanism, liberty, and justice be respected.Insightful, profusely documented, creatively organized, and clearly written, this deeply revisionist study joins the work of authors such as Carlos Forment and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, who years ago insisted that in nineteenth-century Latin America a vibrant, democratic public sphere had been forged in the crucible of republican politics and free elections. The Vanguard of the Atlantic World shall become indispensable to those interested in the history of political culture, democracy, and republicanism not only in Latin America but across the globe.

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro (review)

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro (review)

“Boys Are Running off to the Wars by Scores”: Promoting Masculinity and Conquest in the Coverage of the Mexican-American War

Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the New York Sun, and James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, promoted the Mexican-American War through illustrations that linked conquest with the fulfillment of certain masculine ideals. Both were expansionists who wanted the United States to take Mexican land as spoils of war. But they differed in opinion on how much territory the United States should claim. Beach believed it best to take only the sparsely populated northern portion, whereas Bennett advocated conquering Mexico in its entirety. Consequently, there are important differences in the types of illustrations they published with their war reports that reflect their positions on land acquisition and its connection to the fulfillment of masculine ideals.

Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. GriggsTessChakkalakal and Kenneth W.Warren, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of E. Griggs Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.To the general reader, the prolific E. Griggs is a complete unknown. Even the student of nineteenth century African-American history and literature may only be familiar with his best known work, Imperium in Imperio (1899). In this novel, Griggs creates an underground society fighting for independence and equality. As in much of his fiction, Griggs focuses on competing strategies: will violence or nonviolence prevail? In an entertaining and pointed 2002 essay published in the summer issue of Social Text, Kali Tal placed Imperium in a genre she dubbed black militant science fiction.. .far too important to overlook... delineating] the extent of the rage and violent potential in a long-oppressed population... in its will to freedom and equality (That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction, 67-68).The editors of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of E. Griggs explore Griggs's works within the particular historical, cultural, and geographical conditions that shaped Jim Crow America. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth Warren have assembled eight essays (only one of which has been previously in print) in an impressive work with the expressed objective of connecting Griggs to his present in order to offer ways of understanding the formal and political objective of this important but underappreciated writer (12). In so doing, they have put together a book of remarkable breadth and scholarship. Not only Griggs's enthusiasts, but, indeed, anyone interested in the Jim Crow Era, the history of Texas and the Mexican-American War, manifest destiny and American imperialism, and the interplay of writing and reading between blacks and whites during the nineteenth century should include this work on his or her book shelf.The essays are organized chronologically according to the works considered, the first three focusing on Imperium and Imperio. The only article reprinted from an earlier source is Caroline Levander's excellent Sutton Griggs and the Borderlands of Empire, in which she (along with John Guesser in his contribution) offers a larger cultural context for viewing his work than the usual lens of the African American fight for equality. Their analyses consider both the history of Texas as a borderland and the growth of American imperialism in the nineteenth century. The third essay begins a discussion that continues through many of the subsequent pieces-how Griggs's broad reading of works by both and white authors affected the style and substance of his writing. The next essays look at his lesser known novels: Overshadowed (1901), Unfettered (1902), The Hindered Hand (1905), and his last work of fiction, Pointing the Way (1908). …

Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. By Renata Keller

Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. By Renata Keller

War, education and state formation: problems of territorial and political integration in the United States, 1848–1912

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power.

Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930 Railroad Radicals: Gender, Class, and Memory in Cold War Mexico

Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930 Railroad Radicals: Gender, Class, and Memory in Cold War Mexico

Review: Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory by Robert F. Alegre

Review: Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory by Robert F. Alegre

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz Emily Suzanne Clark Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. 250 pp. $120.00. American Catholicism and the Civil War each have a robust historiography, however these are historiographies that rarely intersect. William B. Kurtz’s Excommunicated by the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America is one of the few books that tells the story of American Catholics during the Civil War. Beginning with the Mexican-American War and concluding with Reconstruction, Kurtz’s work focuses on the Border States and the North and utilizes Catholic newspapers, the writings of the clergy and elite lay Catholics, and the ways in which Catholics remembered the war. Although the Civil War provided an auspicious opportunity for American Catholics to prove their patriotism, Excommunicated by the Union shows that the war alienated many Catholics and played a role in the creation of what other scholars like Martin Marty call the “Catholic cocoon.” Historians have long connected nativism in general and anti-Catholic nativism specifically with the creation of Catholic and ethnic subcultures, but Kurtz’s work further shows that this was not inevitable. He explains, “pro-war Catholic leaders and soldiers were unable to convince other Americans that their religion posed no threat to America’s republican government and institutions” (8). This post-war [End Page 96] withdrawal was further exacerbated by the success of conservative bishops in the late-nineteenth-century Americanist controversy. Kurtz’s monograph is evenly paced and follows a clear chronology that allows him to build his argument. He begins with Catholic patriotism and nativism during the Mexican-American War, which allows him to introduce Catholic distrust of the Republican Party. Part of their unease came from nineteenth-century Catholicism’s preference for “stability over reform” (29). Despite that distrust, Kurtz shows readers how northern Catholics supported the war in its early years. Chapters three and four examine Catholic soldiers and chaplains as well as the nursing efforts of Catholic nuns. As the author pushes back on the assumption that all Catholics were anti-war and instead reveals their patriotism, he also reiterates that many northern and border-state Catholics, like their Protestant neighbors, believed that whites were the superior race. It is complicated terrain that Kurtz navigates well. His exploration of Catholic soldiers’ reasons for serving and the section on the nursing activities of nuns are key places where Excommunicated from the Union really shines. The voices, experiences, and perspectives of these previously overlooked Catholics prompt important historiographical questions that reinforce Kurtz’s argument. From there the book moves onto issues of division: first slavery and then increasing opposition to the war. As the casualty count and financial cost of war rose, more and more Catholics expressed their concern over emancipation and the utility of war. The role of the New York draft riot and Pope Pius IX’s letters for peace loom large here. Those who continued to support the Union’s cause increasingly worried that their Protestant neighbors would further suspect their patriotism and loyalty. The final two chapters explore anti-Catholicism after the war and Catholic remembrance during Reconstruction. Familiar nativist tropes returned and did so with allusions to the Confederate rebellion. Catholic veterans offered important counter-narratives but few other than fellow Catholics were interested in their stories. Excommunicated by the Union fills a significant historiographic gap by exploring American Catholicism during the Civil War. As such, Kurtz brings together two rich historiographies and offers a fascinating narrative of their intersection. Hopefully another historian will heed a similar call for the story of Confederate Catholics. At the time of the Civil War, the majority of American Catholics were in the North or border states, but hearing southern voices alongside Kurtz’s subjects would enrich this text further. This book is a must for college libraries and would do well in a graduate course on American Catholicism or the Civil War. Due to its narrow focus, assigning the full text for an undergraduate course is unlikely...

Presidential Approval and Public Security in Mexico's War on Crime

AbstractTo fight criminal organizations effectively, governments require support from significant segments of society. Citizen support provides important leverage for executives, allowing them to continue their policies. Yet winning citizens' hearts and minds is not easy. Public security is a deeply complex issue. Responsibility is shared among different levels of government; information is highly mediated by mass media and individual acquaintances; and security has a strong effect on peoples' emotions, since it threatens to affect their most valuable assets—life and property. How do citizens translate their assessments of public security into presidential approval? To answer this question, this study develops explicit theoretical insights into the conditions under which different dimensions of public security affect presidential approval. The arguments are tested using Mexico as a case study.