Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency. No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

Scholars contributing to this volume consider topics ranging from the effects of the Mexican Revolution on Tejano and African American communities to its impact on Texas' economy and agriculture. Other essays consider the ways that Mexican Americans north of the border affected the course of the revolution itself.

Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895. Elliott Young provides the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, arguing that Garza’s rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region. Young analyzes archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries to show that Garza’s revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Díaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism and its preeminent symbol, the border, were manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.

The idea of Texas was forged in the crucible of frontier warfare between 1822 and 1865, when Anglo-Americans adapted to mounted combat north of the Rio Grande. This cavalry-centric arena, which had long been the domain of Plains Indians and the Spanish Empire, compelled an adaptive martial tradition that shaped early Lone Star society. Beginning with initial tactical innovation in Spanish Tejas and culminating with massive mobilization for the Civil War, Texas society developed a distinctive way of war defined by armed horsemanship, volunteer militancy, and short-term mobilization as it grappled with both tribal and international opponents. Drawing upon military reports, participants' memoirs, and government documents, cavalry officer Nathan A. Jennings analyzes the evolution of Texan militarism from tribal clashes of colonial Tejas, territorial wars of the Texas Republic, the Mexican-American War, border conflicts of antebellum Texas, and the cataclysmic Civil War. In each conflict Texan volunteers answered the call to arms with marked enthusiasm for mounted combat. Riding for the Lone Star explores this societal passion--with emphasis on the historic rise of the Texas Rangers--through unflinching examination of territorial competition with Comanches, Mexicans, and Unionists. Even as statesmen Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston emerged as influential strategic leaders, captains like Edward Burleson, John Coffee Hays, and John Salmon Ford attained fame for tactical success.

Texas has always lived up to its nickname of the Lone Star state; its rough, tough frontier status and its constant wars with Mexicans and American Indians made it the epitome of the Wild West.This classic account of the border wars of white settlers against the Indians was written in 1912, when the conflicts were well within living memory, and its style reflects the triumphalist view of America's Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny, and its God-given right to lord it over 'inferior' savages'. None the less, DeShields supports the conciliatory policies of Texas's favourite son, Sam Houston.DeShields' work, which used Texas' earliest historical sources such as John Henry Brown, John W. Wilbarger, and Henderson King Yoakum, is made invaluable by his extensive use of other primary source material such as his numerous turn-of-the-century interviews and correspondence with early Texas Rangers and frontiersmen who were yet living. Many of his accounts are found nowhere else in publications of Texas history and thus provide fresh insights into the history of Texas' wars against the Indians.

Excerpt from Border Wars of Texas: Being an Authentic and Popular Account in Chronological Order, of the Long and Bitter Conflict Wage Between Savage Indian Tribes and the Pioneer Settlers of Texas The present volume is the progressed efforts of the author's long cherished design to prepare a popular and reliable narrative of border warfare and Texas frontier history, no satisfactory account in connected form having ever before appeared; indeed it is the first serious attempt in that direction, and the author's purpose will have been accomplish if it should prove of value and be handed down to posterity with increasing interest to each generation, which is but natural as we recede further and further from that dark era of fearful strife so long waged between the red men and their white conquerors. Let the reader remember that this work has been put forth and executed through great labor and painstaking research for data, and a judicious sifting of the wheat from the chaff, that the story might conform to truth, and thus possess a positive value, a mine of historical wealth which will prove the most wholesome of mental pabulum; though the story be told with lack of facileness; with more regard for exactness of statement than ornateness of style or grandiloquence. The complete story in all its thrilling details will never be told, from the lack of reliable data and because of the vastness of such an undertaking - a so fittingly expressed by the versatile J. H. Beadle, as he crossed Red River into Texas on his tour of the "Western Wilds" "Here we enter the land of border romance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.