Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have long supported a web of relationships that transcend the U.S. and Mexican nations. Yet national histories usually overlook these complex connections. Continental Crossroads rediscovers this forgotten terrain, laying the foundations for a new borderlands history at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on the historiographies and archives of both the U.S. and Mexico, the authors chronicle the transnational processes that bound both nations together between the early nineteenth century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands history. A new generation of borderlands historians examines a wide range of topics in frontier and post-frontier contexts. The contributors explore how ethnic, racial, and gender relations shifted as a former frontier became the borderlands. They look at the rise of new imagined communities and border literary traditions through the eyes of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, and recover transnational border narratives and experiences of African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. They also show how surveillance and resistance in the borderlands inflected the “body politics” of gender, race, and nation. Native heroine Bárbara Gandiaga, Mexican traveler Ignacio Martínez, Kiowa warrior Sloping Hair, African American colonist William H. Ellis, Chinese merchant Lee Sing, and a diverse cast of politicos and subalterns, gendarmes and patrolmen, and insurrectos and exiles add transnational drama to the formerly divided worlds of Mexican and U.S. history. Contributors. Grace Peña Delgado, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Louise Pubols, Raúl Ramos, Andrés Reséndez, Bárbara O. Reyes, Alexandra Minna Stern, Samuel Truett, Elliott Young

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.

From the bitter disputes over secession to the ways in which the conflict would be remembered, Texas and Texans were caught up in the momentous struggles of the American Civil War. Tens of thousands of Texans joined military units, and scarcely a household in the state was unaffected as mothers and wives assumed new roles in managing farms and plantations. Still others grappled with the massive social, political, and economic changes wrought by the bloodiest conflict in American history. The sixteen essays (eleven of them new) from some of the leading historians in the field in the second edition of Lone Star Blue and Gray illustrate the rich traditions and continuing vitality of Texas Civil War scholarship. Along with these articles, editors Ralph A. and Robert Wooster provide a succinct introduction to the war and Texas and recommended readings for those seeking further investigations of virtually every aspect of the war as experienced in the Lone Star State.

After the Civil War, a handful of former Confederate leaders joined forces with the Mexican emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg to colonize Mexico with former American slaveholders. Their plan was to develop commercial agriculture in the Mexican state of Coahuila under the guidance of former slaveholders with former slaves providing the bulk of the labor force. By developing these new centers of agricultural production and commercial exchange, the Mexican government hoped to open up new markets and, by extending the few already-existing railroads in the region, also spur further development. The Southern Exodus to Mexico considers the experiences of both white southern elites and common white and black southern farmers and laborers who moved to Mexico during this period. Todd W. Wahlstrom examines in particular how the endemic warfare, raids, and violence along the borderlands of Texas and Coahuila affected the colonization effort. Ultimately, Native groups such as the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Kickapoos, along with local Mexicans, prevented southern colonies from taking hold in the region, where local tradition and careful balances of power negotiated over centuries held more sway than large nationalistic or economic forces. This study of the transcultural tensions and conflicts in this region provides new perspectives for the historical assessment of this period of Mexican and American history.

Did this border caudillo fight to defend the rights, honor, and legal claims of the Mexicans of South Texas, as he claimed? Or was his a quest for personal vengeance against the newcomers who had married into his family, threatened his mother's land holdings, and insulted his honor?

From the early years of the African slave trade to America, blacks have lived and laboured in urban environments. Yet the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is a relatively recent phenomenon - only during World War One did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War Two did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. By the early 1970s, blacks had not only made the transition from rural to urban settings, but were almost evenly distributed between the cities of the North and the West on the one hand and the South on the other. In their quest for full citizenship rights, economic democracy, and release from an oppressive rural past, black southerners turned to urban migration and employment in the nation's industrial sector as a new 'Promised Land' or 'Flight from Egypt'. In order to illuminate these transformations in African American urban life, this book brings together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries.

A richly researched, evocative account of the individuals and institutions involved in the settling of the non-Indian West—and of the impact of the development of the West on the nation as a whole. Making of the American West surveys the experiences of major social groups in the lands from the Mississippi to the Pacific, from the United States' penetration of the region in the early 19th century to its incorporation into national political, economic, and cultural fabric by the early 20th century. This revealing volume offers fascinating portraits of the people and institutions that drove the Western conquest (traders and trappers, ranchers and settlers, corporations, the federal government), as well as of those who resisted conquest or hoped for the emergence of a different society (Indian peoples, Latinos, Asians, wage laborers). Throughout, expert contributors continually return to the growing myth of the West and the impact of its promise of freedom and opportunity on those who sought to "Americanize" it.