On June 18, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson called up virtually the entire army National Guard, some 150,000 men, to meet an armed threat to the United States: border raids covertly sponsored by a Mexican government in the throes of revolution. The Great Call-Up tells for the first time the complete story of this unprecedented deployment and its significance in the history of the National Guard, World War I, and U.S.-Mexico relations. Often confused with the regular-army operation against Pancho Villa and overshadowed by the U.S. entry into World War I, the great call-up is finally given due treatment here by two premier authorities on the history of the Southwest border. Marshaling evidence drawn from newspapers, state archives, reports to Congress, and War Department documents, Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler trace the call-up’s state-based deployment from San Antonio and Corpus Christi, along the Texas and Arizona borders, to California. Along the way, they tell the story of this mass mobilization by examining each unit as it was called up by state, considering its composition, missions, and internal politics. Through this period of intensive training, the Guard became a truly cohesive national, then international, force. Some units would even go directly from U.S. border service to the battlefields of World War I France, remaining overseas until 1919. Balancing sweeping change over time with a keen eye for detail, The Great Call-Up unveils a little-known yet vital chapter in American military history.

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, "War of a Thousand Deserts" recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.

Border Bandits is an account of the many, many stories of back and forth skirmishes between the Mexicans and Texans during the late 1800s and early 1900s. There practically wasn't a border, which caused a lot of problems and thievery between the two countries. These seventeen tales in this book re-create border raids that originated from both sides of the fluid and much contested line and tells the stories of colorful characters - Mexican and American - that have since secured their place in history.

A history of the Mexican-American border region in the early 20th century profiles the violent and colorful figures during the period of the Mexican revolution, when bloody raids and conflicts broke out between Mexicans and American soldiers and frontiersman.

This book addresses the three central issues that continue to dominate the U.S.-Mexico relationship today: drugs, immigration, and security. Nowhere is this more palpable than at the 2,000-mile border shared by the two countries. The U.S.-Mexico border remains a hot topic in the news—and a contentious one. This second edition of a popular work brings readers up to date on what is really going on at the U.S.-Mexico border and why. The book offers a detailed, history-based examination of the evolution of current conditions on the border, arguing that they exist due to a steady growth in the security concerns of the United States over almost two centuries. The author shows how the border has gone through four historical stages that, ultimately, have crippled the region, sacrificing its ability to produce prosperity in exchange for greater security. Combining depth and breadth, the book covers the economic relationship between Mexico and the United States, the deployment of technology, the bureaucratic interests that control the border landscape, the democratic deficit, and a detrimental lack of policy coordination. Issues such as drug trafficking and homeland security are considered as well. Demonstrating the internal and contradictory logic of American policy toward the border, the author argues that current conditions could lead to a return of authoritarianism in Mexico and a concurrent rise in anti-American sentiment.