José María de Jesús Carvajalis both a biography of a Mexican postrevolutionary and a study of the development of a new border between Mexico and the United States during the crucial decades of the early to mid–nineteenth century. The work examines the challenges faced by Carvajal, a bilingual, bicultural character in confusing times, against the historical backdrop of the history of colonial Texas and northern Mexico. Chance has chosen to focus on a political-military figure whose career stretches from the Texas Revolution to the French Intervention. Carvajal played a key role in the violent struggle between the liberal and conservative political factions that vied for control of the Republic of Mexico from 1830 to 1874. He was the leader of a mercenary army that invaded Mexico from the United States in 1851 in an unsuccessful attempt for the creation of the so-called independent Republic of the Sierra Madre. In addition, he played significant roles in the struggle for Texas Independence and formation of the ill-fated Republic of the Rio Grande; and he opposed the American occupation of northern Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the War of Reform that solidified liberal control of Mexico under the leadership of Benito Juarez, and the French Intervention into Mexico. Carvajal’s life and exploits have been largely overlooked by contemporary historians. This work sheds new light on several important chapters in the history of Texas and northern Mexico.

Present-day smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. However, it is only the latest chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, borderlanders continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of smuggling as just. In Border Contraband, George T. Díaz provides the first history of the common, yet little studied, practice of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Part I, he examines the period between 1848 and 1910, when the United States’ and Mexico’s trade concerns focused on tariff collection and on borderlanders’ attempts to avoid paying tariffs by smuggling. Part II begins with the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when national customs and other security forces on the border shifted their emphasis to the interdiction of prohibited items (particularly guns and drugs) that threatened the state. Díaz’s pioneering research explains how greater restrictions have transformed smuggling from a low-level mundane activity, widely accepted and still routinely practiced, into a highly profitable professional criminal enterprise.

In recent years, Civil War veterans have emerged from historical obscurity. Inspired by recent interest in memory studies and energized by the ongoing neorevisionist turn, a vibrant new literature has given the lie to the once-obligatory lament that the postbellum lives of Civil War soldiers were irretrievable. Despite this flood of historical scholarship, fundamental questions about the essential character of Civil War veteranhood remain unanswered. Moreover, because work on veterans has often proceeded from a preoccupation with cultural memory, the Civil War’s ex-soldiers have typically been analyzed as either symbols or producers of texts. In The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, fifteen of the field’s top scholars provide a more nuanced and intimate look at the lives and experiences of these former soldiers. Essays in this collection approach Civil War veterans from oblique angles, including theater, political, and disability history, as well as borderlands and memory studies. Contributors examine the lives of Union and Confederate veterans, African American veterans, former prisoners of war, amputees, and ex-guerrilla fighters. They also consider postwar political elections, veterans’ business dealings, and even literary contests between onetime enemies and among former comrades.

This user-friendly encyclopedia comprises a wide array of accessible yet detailed entries that address the military, social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of the Mexican-American War. The Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War: A Political, Social, and Military History provides an in-depth examination of not only the military conflict itself, but also the impact of the war on both nations; and how this conflict was the first waged by Americans on foreign soil and served to establish critical U.S. military, political, and foreign policy precedents. The entries analyze the Mexican-American War from both the American and Mexican perspectives, in equal measure. In addition to discussing the various campaigns, battles, weapons systems, and other aspects of military history, the three-volume work also contextualizes the conflict within its social, cultural, political, and economic milieu, and places the Mexican-American War into its proper historical and historiographical contexts by covering the eras both before and after the war. This information is particularly critical for students of American history because the conflict fomented sectional conflict in the United States, which resulted in the U.S. Civil War.

Historians have paid scant attention to the five years that span from the conclusion early in 1848 of Mexico’s disastrous conflict with the United States to the final return to power in April 1853 of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. This volume presents a more thorough understanding of this pivotal time, and the issues and experiences that then affected Mexicans. It sheds light on how elite politics, church-state relations, institutional affairs, and peasant revolts played a crucial role in Mexico’s long-term historical development, and also explores topics like marriage and everyday life, and the public trials and executions staged in the aftermath of the war with the U.S.

At a time when the U.S.-Mexican border was still not clearly defined and when the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and land hunger impelled the Anglo presence ever deeper and more intrusively into South Texas, Juan Nepomucino Cortina cut a violent swath across the region in a conflict that came to be known as The Cortina War. Did this border caudillo fight to defend the rights, honor, and legal claims of the Mexicans of South Texas, as he claimed? Or was his a quest for personal vengeance against the newcomers who had married into his family, threatened his mother’s land holdings, and insulted his honor? Historian Jerry Thompson mines the archival record and considers it in light of recent revisionist history of the region. As a result, he produces not only a carefully nuanced work on Cortina—the most comprehensive to date for this pivotal borderlands figure—but also a balanced interpretation of the violence that racked South Texas from the 1840s through the 1860s. Cortina’s influence in the region made him a force to be reckoned with during the American Civil War. He influenced Mexican politics from the 1840s to the 1870s and fought in the Mexican Army for more than forty-five years. His daring cross-border cattle raids, carried out for more than two decades, made his exploits the stuff of sensational journalism in the newspapers of New York, Boston, and other American cities. By the time of his imprisonment in 1877, Cortina and his followers had so roiled South Texas that Anglo reprisals were being taken against Mexicans and Tejanos throughout the region, ironically worsening the racism that had infuriated Cortina in the beginning. The effects of this troubled period continue to resonate in Anglo-Mexican and Anglo-Tejano relations, down to this very day. Students of regional and borderlands history will find this premier biography to be a rich source of new perspectives. Its transnational focus and balanced approach will reward scholarly and general readers alike.

Tejanos (Texans of Mexican heritage) were instrumental leaders in the life and development of Texas during the Mexican period, the war of independence, and the Texas Republic. Jesús F. de la Teja and ten other scholars examine the lives, careers, and influence of many long-neglected but historically significant Tejano leaders who were active and influential in the formation, political and military leadership, and economic development of Texas. In Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas, lesser-known figures such as Father Refugio de la Garza, Juan Martín Veramendi, José Antonio Saucedo, Raphael Manchola, and Carlos de la Garza join their better-known counterparts—José Antonio Navarro, Juan Seguín, and Plácido Benavides, for example—on the stage of Texas and regional historical consideration. This book also features a foreword by David J. Weber, in which he discusses how Anglocentric views allowed important Tejano figures to fade from public knowledge. Students and scholars of Texas and regional history, those interested in Texana, and readers in Latino/a studies will glean important insights from Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas.