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- Verified Buyer
As a Californian with a conservative/libertarian bent, I've often jokingly responded to people who claim we have no right to this land that was stolen from Mexico (and the indigenous tribes prior to that!) that we stole it fair and square, just like just about every other piece of land in the world has been stolen from someone else somewhere along the way. But other than the part where we Remember the Alamo and that the Treaty of Hidalgo is how we formally received the lands that became California and Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, I really didn't know much about how the Mexican-American War started and ended.Having recently read a very enjoyable book on John Wesley Powell and his expeditions down the Colorado River ("The Promise of the Grand Canyon") and the efforts to tame/irrigate the west, I wanted to better understand how we had won/stolen the Southwest, and when I did my research on it, this book came highly recommended.The author has a very clear bias against the war, but also does a very good job of making that case, focusing on several key historical figures of the time. It is not at all a military history of the war, but really exclusively a political and social history, which is what I was looking for. I came away with a much better understanding of how controversial the war was even at the time, and how the politics of that war shaped the US for decades and helped precipitate the Civil War. The story of how the treaty negotiations took place were wild and totally blew my mind (no spoilers...).Very readable and very informative, and now when I tell people we stole California fair and square, I'll put a bigger emphasis on the "stole" part rather than the "fair and square" part. :-)
