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The Mexican National Army, 1822-1852.
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My passion for Mexican and military history came from many sources. Wandering in my 20s in Europe and Asia honed my appreciation for the historical experience. Good friends in the Canadian military made me curious about the odd rituals and strange subcultures they inhabited. As I moved from Calgary to Vancouver to Tucson I devolved from degree to degree, studying deviance, military history, Mexican culture, and finally finishing a dissertation that combined these elements into one work. And now I happily get to inflict all of this history on my students in California.
This work combines excellent writing with impeccable research from a scholar I deeply respect. Guardino’s take on this war is persuasive and somewhat controversial, at least in Mexican circles, due to his analysis showing endemic supply issues at the heart of military failures in the face of a US invasion. He shows how the war goes horribly wrong for Mexico in a New Military History style approach that examines society using the army as a lens.
Winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize Winner of the Utley Prize Winner of the Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History
"The Dead March incorporates the work of Mexican historians...in a story that involves far more than military strategy, diplomatic maneuvering, and American political intrigue...Studded with arresting insights and convincing observations." -James Oakes, New York Review of Books
"Superb...A remarkable achievement, by far the best general account of the war now available. It is critical, insightful, and rooted in a wealth of archival sources; it brings far more of the Mexican experience than any other work...and it clearly demonstrates the social…
My passion for Mexican and military history came from many sources. Wandering in my 20s in Europe and Asia honed my appreciation for the historical experience. Good friends in the Canadian military made me curious about the odd rituals and strange subcultures they inhabited. As I moved from Calgary to Vancouver to Tucson I devolved from degree to degree, studying deviance, military history, Mexican culture, and finally finishing a dissertation that combined these elements into one work. And now I happily get to inflict all of this history on my students in California.
Reed’s wonderful writing style and great turns of phrase make this an enjoyable read, while his attention to detail and excellent research make it requisite to understanding the long Caste War of the Maya after 1847. It is a critical antidote to works that pay too little attention to indigenous agents, to religious motivations, and to a long-simmering insurrection with vibrant cultural voices. Other works have taken this on since, but it remains a classic.
This is the classic account of one of the most dramatic episodes in Mexican history-the revolt of the Maya Indians of Yucatan against their white and mestizo oppressors that began in 1847. Within a year, the Maya rebels had almost succeeded in driving their oppressors from the peninsula; by 1855, when the major battles ended, the war had killed or put to flight almost half of the population of Yucatan. A new religion built around a Speaking Cross supported their independence for over fifty years, and that religion survived the eventual Maya defeat and continues today.
My passion for Mexican and military history came from many sources. Wandering in my 20s in Europe and Asia honed my appreciation for the historical experience. Good friends in the Canadian military made me curious about the odd rituals and strange subcultures they inhabited. As I moved from Calgary to Vancouver to Tucson I devolved from degree to degree, studying deviance, military history, Mexican culture, and finally finishing a dissertation that combined these elements into one work. And now I happily get to inflict all of this history on my students in California.
McNamara’s wonderful account shows how communities in Oaxaca understood military service as both a duty to their region, to their people, and as a way to connect to the wider national project and specific presidents. Fighting for the National Guard created a different stake in Mexico and in political life, and the ways that Zapotec peasants remembered this gives new insights into participatory political culture.
The period following Mexico's war with the United States in 1847 was characterized by violent conflicts, as liberal and conservative factions battled for control of the national government. In ""Sons of the Sierra"", Patrick McNamara explores events in the Oaxaca district of Ixtlan, where Zapotec Indians supported the liberal cause and sought to exercise influence over statewide and national politics. Two Mexican presidents had direct ties to Ixtlan district: Benito Juarez, who served as Mexico's liberal president from 1858 to 1872, was born in the district, and Porfirio Diaz, president from 1876 to 1911, had led a National Guard battalion…
My passion for Mexican and military history came from many sources. Wandering in my 20s in Europe and Asia honed my appreciation for the historical experience. Good friends in the Canadian military made me curious about the odd rituals and strange subcultures they inhabited. As I moved from Calgary to Vancouver to Tucson I devolved from degree to degree, studying deviance, military history, Mexican culture, and finally finishing a dissertation that combined these elements into one work. And now I happily get to inflict all of this history on my students in California.
This is a great book written by an accomplished scholar later in his career and confident in his research and writing. Telling the tale of the uprising, and crushing, of Tomochic village, Vanderwood zooms into the smaller details of village life and pans out to nation-level decisions with remarkable panache. In a highly enjoyable way, he brings the reader into the action without omitting the broader historical relevance. The reader may enter this for the critique of the dictator’s late nineteenth-century armies, but they will keep reading to find the fate of the unfortunate “town son of a bitch.”
In the early 1890's, an armed rebellion fueled by religious fervor erupted over a wide area of northwestern Mexico. At the center of the outburst were a few hundred farmers from the village of Tomochic and a teenage folk saint named Teresa, who was ministering to thousands of people throughout the area. When the villagers proclaimed, "We will obey no one but God!," the Mexican government exiled "Santa Teresa" to the United States and trained its guns and bayonets on the farmers. A bloody confrontation ensued-God against government-that is still remembered in song, literature, films, and civic celebrations.
I grew up in Mexico listening to my father´s stories about the Mexican revolution. His storytelling abilities drew me in as he described his childhood memories and those of his father, who lived through the revolution. That's why I became a historian writing about the Mexican Revolution with a preference for biographies. As the Latin Americanist historian at St. John's University in New York City, I've written two books: Maximino Avila Camacho and the One Party State, Pancho Villa: A Biography, and edited A Brief History of Mexico by Lynn V. Foster. I hope you enjoy the list of books on significant personalities that shaped the first major social revolution of the twentieth century.
I was always fascinated by the story of Alvaro Obregon—this apparently unassuming general of the revolution slowly but surely knocking out one by one anyone getting on his way to become Mexico´s strongman. Not a minor feat considering that these include powerful and charismatic titans such as Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza. An ingenious strategist general and an uncanny political operator, Obregon is the man who finally brings peace and stability to Mexico after a long decade of unimaginable violence. Linda Hall beautifully threads the history of the revolution with the slow but effective rise of Obregon from a modest farmer to the presidency of Mexico.
The Mexican Revolution produced some romantic and heroic figures. In Mexico at the time, however, one man loomed large as the embodiment of revolutionary goals and the one leader able to take the country from strife into peace. That man was Alvaro Obregón.
Less well-known to North Americans than his contemporaries and sometime allies Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, Obregón eventually formed the first stable government of post-revolutionary Mexico. Stories of his daring and near-invincibility abounded as he led revolutionary forces against the usurper Huerta, then against the "bandit" elements within the Revolution itself. Throughout the period of fighting, however,…
Carrie Gibson is a London-based writer who grew up in the US and spends as much time as she can in Latin America and the Caribbean. She started out as a journalist, working at UK newspapers, including the Guardian and the Observer, before diving into a PhD and historical research on European colonialism and its legacy in the Americas. She is the author of two books and continues to contribute to media outlets in the UK and US.
I’m not usually a fan of political memoirs (I tend to be skeptical of the authors), but this one is an enlightening read in terms of understanding the sorts of structural and governmental prejudices that Hispanic people faced in the early twentieth century as exemplified by New Mexico’s long struggle to obtain statehood. Otero was from a prominent New Mexican family and was the governor of the territory from 1897 to 1906. New Mexico was acquired as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848, but it didn’t become a state until 1912, due in part to the anti-Hispanic attitudes in Washington DC that Otero discusses in his book.
Miguel Antonio Otero (1859-1944) not only distinguished himself as a political leader in New Mexico and lived out his life as a champion of the people, but he is also highly recognized for his career as an author. He published his legendary My Life on the Frontier, 1864-1882, in 1935, followed by The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War in 1936, My Life on the Frontier, 1882-1897 in 1939, and My Nine Years as Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, 1897-1906 in 1940. These books, of which this is one in Sunstone's Southwest…
Dana Thomas is the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Thomas began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post, and for fifteen years she served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is currently a contributing editor for British Vogue, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section and Architectural Digest. She wrote the screenplay for Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, a feature documentary directed by Luca Guadagnino. In 2016, the French Minister of Culture named Thomas a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.
While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.
In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American.
Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none…
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in Napoleon, although in what ways have shifted back and forth over time. His reforms shaped the Europe we live in today, as few other rulers have managed. To go to law, to buy and sell, to marry, be born, or divorce, all these actions belong to his Civil Code. That is why I took up the study of his regime and its work as a professional historian. His myth, his exploits, gripped me as a boy, and still do. So spectacular a rise and fall do not happen by chance. There was no one like him.
The accomplished historian of France across the years of Revolution, Empire and Restoration, Munro Price brings all his arsenal of erudition, archival acumen, and intellectual insight to bear on the last crisis of the empire. His attention to detail, his sensitivity to character and motivation make for one of the most penetrating, illuminating accounts of the implosion of support for Napoleon among the French elites ever written. No non-French scholar had picked through the complex politics of late Napoleonic France with as much skill or precision. Price delivers all this in elegant prose, the sign of a subtle historian.
On April 20, 1814, after a dizzying series of battles, campaigns, and diplomatic intrigues, a defeated Napoleon Bonaparte made his farewell speech to the Old Guard in the courtyard of the Chateau de Fontainebleau and set off for exile on the island of Elba. Napoleonic legend asserts that the Emperor was brought down by foreign powers determined to destroy him and discredit his achievements, with the aid of highly placed domestic traitors. Others argue that once Napoleon's military defeats began in 1812, his fall became inevitable. But in fact, as Munro Price shows in this brilliant new book, Napoleon's fall…
I have been studying and writing about, anarchism, gender, and the Spanish Civil War for almost 4 decades. I first explored what it would mean to organize a society without formal institutions of authority; and, as part of that research, I looked at how anarcho-syndicalist organizations related to governmental institutions and the struggle against fascism in Spain. I then engaged in a multi-year investigation of the social revolution that occurred in the midst of the ensuing Civil War and, in particular, the activities of the anarchist women’s organization, Mujeres Libres. Through the research for my book, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, I was captivated by the extraordinary strength and enthusiasm of those women, and committed myself to telling their stories in ways that would be relevant to contemporary readers.
This book was originally published almost immediately after the Civil War and provides an extraordinarily rich—and yet very readable---account of the many conflicting forces that led up to the war. It is an indispensable introduction to that history.
Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. Written during and immediately after the Civil War, this book has all the vividness of the author's experience. It represents a struggle to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the…
I taught about Napoleon for thirty years, having studied history at Cambridge. I’ve been fascinated by the Corsican outsider, who, thanks to the French Revolution, rose to dominate Europe, since I saw a china bust of him in his green Chasseurs uniform on my maternal grandparents’ sideboard. I always loved historical fiction and having retired into a locked-down world, I put my time on the Isle of Skye to good use and set about researching and writing the novel I had always said I would write. Re-reading old favourites and encountering new interpretations was a joy and certainly made compiling this list an enjoyable challenge!
As a St Helena Lullabyputs it, quoted by Horne at the start of his scholarly but eminently readable book, "How far is St Helena from the field of Austerlitz?" Horne is a brilliant historian and he crafts a compelling book tracing Napoleon’s career from its apogee on the field of his greatest victory to its nadir with his exile to St Helena, far out in the south Atlantic. But we don’t just get the events, we get to experience the slippery nature of success, as Spain swallows troops and Russia decimates the Grande Armée. We see this through Napoleon’s own words, and Horne’s relentless research, as he struggles to maintain his dominance. I loved the balanced assessment of this final decade in power. I marvelled at Bonaparte’s brilliance and achievements whilst learning to appreciate how much the odds were stacked against him.
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