Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Mexican War
James K. Polk appears doomed to remain one of our least-appreciated presidents, despite Robert W. Merry’s valiant attempt to drag him from the shadows in A Country of Vast Designs.
Ne’er-do-wells and deserters, these soldiers lived hard, fought hard— and died when they saw a flag go up
Fistfights broke out in Congress in 1850 over whether the territories just won in the Mexican War should be slave or free—and only a last-minute series of compromises prevented catastrophe.
On a raw evening in winter of 1850, a weary-looking, feeble, and desperately ill old man arrived unannounced at the Washington, D.C. residence of Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky had come to seek Webster’s help in his battle to save the Union.
John Walker Lindh was hardly the first American turncoat.
“Rat!” screamed the tabloid headlines when John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” was hauled out of a prison basement in Afghanistan and into the public limelight. Media commentators had a field day projecting their obsessions onto Mr. Lindh.
Most of them were American soldiers who fought with skill, discipline, and high courage against a U.S. Army that numbered Ulysses Grant in its ranks. The year was 1847.
The court-martial of Captain John O’Reilly was one of 29 convened by the United States Army at the San Angel prison camp in Mexico on August 28, 1847: 36 other men of O’Reilly’s San Patricio Battalion faced courts-martial on that same day at nearby Tacubaya.
Westward with the course of empire Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson took his way in 1846. With him went the denizens of New York’s Tammany wards, oyster cellars, and gin mills—the future leaders of California.
In the bright mestizo tapestry of Mexico’s thirty centuries of civilization, the Indian, the Spanish, and the modern threads interweave—and tangle
About one hundred years ago a roaring hurricane swept along the Mexican border with such fury that it radically changed the course of the Rio Grande—and consequently altered the international boundary. When the storm finally subsided, the village of El Paso, Texas, was about 630 acres larger, and the bawdy little pueblo of Juárez, Mexico, was that many acres smaller.
Long before Vietnam, Korea, the Argonne, or San Juan Hill, there was Mexico. As usual, it was the average G.I. who shouldered the burden of our foreign policy and what it cost in blood. This is the very graphic story of one foot soldier, as he told it in letters to his family back home in Massachusetts
John Charles Frémont never succeeded in living up to his fame, yet he was one of America’s great explorers
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