First-hand testimony about the war in Texas, written in the heat of the events that took the lives of more than half of Mexican territory by the United States. Part One: Since the discovery and possession of Texas, by the Spanish people, to start lel social and military crisis that triggered the state of war between the people of the colonies. Part II. First War period, beginning with the year 1835, when Mexico declared, but already had forced the rebellious colonies.

Chronicles the experiences Warren Jackson had while serving as a marine in France during World War I.

A retired Texas Ranger recalls a career that took him from shootouts in South Texas to film sets in Hollywood. When his picture appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly, Joaquin Jackson became the icon of the modern Texas Rangers. Nick Nolte modeled his character in the movie Extreme Prejudice on him. Jackson even had a speaking part of his own in The Good Old Boys with Tommy Lee Jones. But the role that Jackson has always played the best is that of the man who wears the silver badge cut from a Mexican cinco peso coin, a working Texas Ranger. Legend says that one Ranger is all it takes to put down lawlessness and restore the peace: one riot, one Ranger. In this adventure-filled memoir, Joaquin Jackson recalls what it was like to be the Ranger who responded when riots threatened, violence erupted, and criminals needed to be brought to justice across a wide swath of the Texas-Mexico border from 1966 to 1993. Jackson has dramatic stories to tell. Defying all stereotypes, he was the one Ranger who ensured a fair election—and an overwhelming win for La Raza Unida party candidates—in Zavala County in 1972. He followed legendary Ranger Captain Alfred Y. Allee Sr. into a shootout at the Carrizo Springs jail that ended a prison revolt and left him with nightmares. He captured “The See More Kid,” an elusive horse thief and burglar who left clean dishes and swept floors in the houses he robbed. He investigated the 1988 shootings in Big Bend’s Colorado Canyon and tried to understand the motives of the Mexican teenagers who terrorized three river rafters and killed one. He even helped train Afghan mujahedin warriors to fight the Soviet Union. Jackson’s tenure in the Texas Rangers began when older Rangers still believed that law need not get in the way of maintaining order, and concluded as younger Rangers were turning to computer technology to help solve crimes. Though he insists, “I am only one Ranger. There was only one story that belonged to me,” his story is part of the larger story of the Texas Rangers becoming a modern law enforcement agency that serves all the people of the state. It’s a story that’s as interesting as any of the legends. And yet, Jackson’s story confirms the legends, too. With just over a hundred Texas Rangers to cover a state with 267,399 square miles, any one may become the one Ranger who, like Joaquin Jackson in Zavala County in 1972, stops one riot. “A powerful, moving read . . . One Ranger is as fascinating as the memoirs of nineteenth-century Rangers James Gillett and George Durham, and the histories by Frederick Wilkins and Walter Prescott Webb—and equally as important.” —True West “A straight-shooting book that blow[s] a few holes in the Ranger myth while providing more ammunition for the myth’s continuation. . . . Reads more like a novel than [an] autobiography.” —Austin American-Statesman

Gen. Vicente Filisola was second in command of the Mexican army in Texas during the Revolution. After the defeat of Gen. José López de Santa Anna by Sam Houston's Texans at San Jacinto, Filisola became commander-in-chief of the four thousand Mexican soldiers that remained in Texas. The Mexican army eventually retreated to Matamoros, Mexico, and Filisola became the scapegoat for all that went wrong in the campaign in Texas. His chief accuser in this disastrous action was Gen. José Cosme Urrea, commander of one of the Mexican divisions in the campaign. After reading this fascinating account of the Mexican army in Texas, readers may well need to reevaluate their opinions of the Mexican army's generals. In spite of the fact that the work is obviously biased and at times blatantly unfair, Filisola makes valid points that will make one wonder if Urrea deserves the high respect that has been generally accorded him by Texan scholars.

"This is the memoir of J. R. Ritter (1902-1994), a civil engineer from Texas who became a U.S. Navy Seabee officer during World War II. The formal name of the Seabees is "U.S. Naval Construction Battalions" and they were responsible for building airstrips, barracks, and other infrastructure for the troops. Ritter was first stationed in Alaska when Japan was thought to be planning an invasion through the Aleutians, then in the Central Pacific, mainly on Tinian Island. He was on Tinian when the war ended"--

During the First World War, nearly half a million immigrant draftees from forty-six different nations served in the U.S. Army. This surge of Old World soldiers challenged the American military's cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions and required military leaders to reconsider their training methods for the foreign-born troops. How did the U.S. War Department integrate this diverse group into a united fighting force?The war department drew on the experiences of progressive social welfare reformers, who worked with immigrants in urban settlement houses, and they listened to industrial efficiency experts, who connected combat performance to morale and personnel management. Perhaps most significantly, the military enlisted the help of ethnic community leaders, who assisted in training, socializing, and Americanizing immigrant troops and who pressured the military to recognize and meet the important cultural and religious needs of the ethnic soldiers. These community leaders negotiated the Americanization process by promoting patriotism and loyalty to the United States while retaining key ethnic cultural traditions.Offering an exciting look at an unexplored area of military history, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I constitutes a work of special interest to scholars in the fields of military history, sociology, and ethnic studies. Ford'sresearch illuminates what it meant for the U.S. military to reexamine early twentieth-century nativism; instead of forcing soldiers into a melting pot, war department policies created an atmosphere that made both American and ethnic pride acceptable.During the war, a German officer commented on the ethnic diversity of the American army and noted, with some amazement, that these "semi-Americans" considered themselves to be "true-born sons of their adopted country." The officer was wrong on one count. The immigrant soldiers were not "semi-Americans"; they were "Americans all!"

Herman Ehrenberg wrote the longest, most complete, and most vivid memoir of any soldier in the Texan revolutionary army. His narrative was published in Germany in 1843, but it was little used by Texas historians until the twentieth century, when the first--and very problematic--attempts at translation into English were made. Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg is a product of the translation skills of the late Louis E. Brister with the assistance of James C. Kearney, both noted specialists on Germans in Texas. The volume's editor, James E. Crisp, has spent much of the last 27 years solving many of the mysteries that still surrounded Ehrenberg's life. It was Crisp who discovered that Ehrenberg lived in the Texas Republic until at least 1840 and spent the spring of that year as ranger on the frontier. Ehrenberg was not a historian, but an ordinary citizen whose narrative of the Texas Revolution contains both spectacular eyewitness accounts of action and almost mythologized versions of major events that he did not witness himself. This volume points out where Ehrenberg is lying or embellishing, explains why he is doing so, and narrates the actual relevant facts as far as they can be determined. Ehrenberg's book is both a testament by a young Texan "everyman" who presents a laudatory paean to the Texan cause, and a German's explanation of Texas and its "fight for freedom" against Mexico to his fellow Germans--with a powerful subtext that patriotic Germans should aspire to a similar struggle, and a similar outcome: a free, democratic republic.

Ward Loren Schrantz, of Carthage, Missouri, entered the U.S. Army in 1912, at a time when military leaders were still seriously debating the future of the horse cavalry. He left active military service in 1946, after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Schrantz served capably at a time when the U.S. military was undergoing rapid technological and strategic transformation and, as a journalist and attentive observer, left a vivid personal account of his time in the Army and Missouri National Guard. Editor Jeff Patrick has woven three undated versions of Schrantz's memoir into a single narrative focused on the sparsely documented pre–World War I period from 1912 to 1917, thus helping to fill a significant gap in the existing literature. Schrantz's memoir is notable not only for the period it covers, but also for its lively evocation of a soldier's life during the U.S.-Mexico border disturbances of the early twentieth century. Schrantz's account demonstrates the perennial contrast between how soldiers were expected to behave and how they actually behaved; it offers colorful and authentic details not usually available from official histories. Patrick also has added an appendix consisting of the letters that Schrantz wrote for publication in his hometown newspaper, the Carthage Evening Press. These documents yield interesting insights into the attitudes and dispositions of U.S. soldiers during this time, as well as the perceptions and opinions of the "folks back home." Students, scholars, and others interested in military and borderlands history will find much to enjoy in Guarding the Border: The Military Memoirs of Ward Schrantz, 1912–1917.