Jos Agust n Quintero (1829-1885) was a Cuban American from New Orleans, Louisiana who skillfully and energetically represented the Confederacy in northeastern Mexico during the Civil War. This dynamic multilingual leader helped coordinate the defensive plans necessary to protect the Texas border and insure the procurement of war material and provisions vital to the Southern Army. He is a relatively unknown but fascinating figure in many ways: a native of Cuba who participated in his country's struggle for independence against Spain, an outstanding writer of Cuban patriotic poetry, and an American who was highly respected and recognized for his legal and journalistic accomplishments, as well as his significant diplomatic contributions to the Southern Cause. This is the story of a man of extraordinary culture, an extremely intelligent, capable, and determined immigrant who believed passionately in a cause and dedicated much of his short life to it....

Illusions of Empire is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican sources to depict a borderlands conflict with lasting ramifications.

Riding the rough and sometimes bloody peaks and canyons of border politics, Santos Benavides’s rise to prominence was largely the result of the careful mentoring of his well-known uncle, Basilio Benavides, who served several terms as alcalde of Laredo, Texas, and Chief Justice of Webb County. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Basilio was one of only two Tejanos in the state legislature. During Santos’s lifetime, five flags flew over the small community he called home—that of the Republic of Mexico, the ill-fated Republic of the Rio Grande, the Republic of Texas, an expansionist United States, and in March 1861, the rebellious Confederate States of America. It was under the Confederacy in the disputed Texas-Mexico borderlands that Santos Benavides reached the pinnacle of his military career as the highest-ranking Tejano in the entire Confederate army. In the decades that followed the Civil War, he became an esteemed political leader, highly respected on both sides of the border. This is the first scholarly study of this important historical figure. At the pinnacle of his political career in 1879, Benavides held the distinction of being the only Tejano in the Texas legislature. Through strife, sweat, blood, and heroism in defense of the border, Benavides rose to economic and political heights few could dream of. As a friend and confidant of two Mexican presidents, he was one of the single most influential individuals in the nineteenth-century history of the border. His life was one of enduring perseverance as well as binational leadership and skilled diplomacy. He was without doubt the single most important individual in the long and often violent history of Laredo. The niche he carved in the tumultuous transnational history of the Texas-Mexico borderlands seems secure.

Writers on both sides of the American Civil War “brought to the crisis” (in editor J. D. McClatchys’ words) “poetry’s unique ability to stir the emotions, to freeze the moment, to sweep the scene with a panoramic lens and suddenly swoop in for a close-up of suffering or courage.” This vibrant collection brings together the most memorable and enduring work inspired by the conflict: the masterpieces of Whitman and Melville, Sidney Lanier on the death of Stonewall Jackson, the anti-slavery poems of Longfellow and Whittier, the front-line narratives of Henry Howard Brownell and John W. De Forest, the anthems of Julia Ward Howe and James Ryder Randall. Grief, indignation, pride, courage, patriotic fervor, ultimately reconciliation and healing: the poetry of the Civil War evokes unforgettably the emotions that roiled America in its darkest hour. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

During the turbulent years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a squall of violence and lawlessness swept through the Nueces Strip and the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. Cattle rustlers, regular troops, and Texas Rangers, as well as Civil War deserters and other characters of questionable reputation, clashed with Mexicans, Germans, and Indians over unionism, race, livestock, land, and national sovereignty, among other issues. In A Crooked River, Michael L. Collins presents a rousing narrative of these events that reflects perspectives of people on both sides of the Rio Grande. Retracing a path first opened by historian Walter Prescott Webb, A Crooked River reveals parts of the tale that Webb never told. Collins brings a cross-cultural perspective to the role of the Texas Rangers in the continuing strife along the border during the late nineteenth century. He draws on many rare and obscure sources to chronicle the incidents of the period, bringing unprecedented depth and detail to such episodes as the “skinning wars,” the raids on El Remolino and Las Cuevas, and the attack on Nuecestown. Along the way, he dispels many entrenched legends of Texas history—in particular, the long-held belief that almost all of the era’s cattle thieves were Mexican. A balanced and thorough reevaluation, A Crooked River adds a new dimension to the history of the racial and cultural conflict that defined the border region and that still echoes today.

This book traces and analyses the relationship between Britain and Spain in its various forms since 1489. So often viewed as antagonistic rivals in history, the two countries are here compared and contrasted in order to shed light on their international connection and how this has evolved over time. Mark Lawrence reflects on the similarities of their composite monarchies, their roles as successive projectors of European global power, and the common fondness for peculiarly patriotic expressions of Christianity through the ages. At the same time, Lawrence is alert to recognising other ways in which Britain and Spain have seemed worlds apart in their respective corners of the European continent. He examines how British Protestants excoriated Spain in a 'Black Legend', while Catholic propagandists dismissed rising English power as the work of pirates and heretics during the early modern period. In a series of chronological chapters rich with a diverse range of sources, Anglo-Hispania beyond the Black Legend considers the cultural exchanges which flourished amidst the growth of travel and new ideas in the 18th century, the surprising alliances of the 19th century and the shared international causes of the 20th. Whereas Spaniards feared or admired Britain for its successful political and fiscal system, the book convincingly argues, Britons romanticised Iberia for its supposed failures. It ultimately concludes that British campaigns in the 1700s and 1800s established a Romantic Spain in memoir culture which the 20th century gradually dissolved in the ideological cauldron of the 1930s and the advent of mass tourism.

A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as “exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…” by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart’s bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations.