Written "to set the record straight," these veterans' stories provide colorful accounts of the bloody battles of Valverde, Glorieta, and Peralta, as well as details fo the soldier's tragic and painful retreat back to Texas in the summer of 1862.

Still the least-understood theater of the Civil War, the Southwest Borderlands saw not only Union and Confederate forces clashing but Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggling for survival, power, and dominance on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While other scholars have examined individual battles, Andrew E. Masich is the first to analyze these conflicts as interconnected civil wars. Based on previously overlooked Indian Depredation Claim records and a wealth of other sources, this book is both a close-up history of the Civil War in the region and an examination of the war-making traditions of its diverse peoples. Along the border, Masich argues, the Civil War played out as a collision between three warrior cultures. Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos brought their own weapons and tactics to the struggle, but they also shared many traditions. Before the war, the three groups engaged one another in cycles of raid and reprisal involving the taking of livestock and human captives, reflecting a peculiar mixture of conflict and interdependence. When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West. Indians fought Indians, Hispanos battled Hispanos, and Anglos vied for control of the Southwest, while each group sought allies in conflicts related only indirectly to the secession crisis. When Union and Confederate forces invaded the Southwest, Anglo soldiers, Hispanos, and sedentary Indian tribes forged alliances that allowed them to collectively wage a relentless war on Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos. Mexico’s civil war and European intervention served only to enlarge the conflict in the borderlands. When the fighting subsided, a new power hierarchy had emerged and relations between the region’s inhabitants, and their nations, forever changed. Masich’s perspective on borderlands history offers a single, cohesive framework for understanding this power shift while demonstrating the importance of transnational and multicultural views of the American Civil War and the Southwest Borderlands.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

The war between the United States and Mexico was decades in the making. Although Texas was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, Texans retained an affiliation with the United States that virtually assured annexation at some point. Mexico's reluctance to give up Texas put it on a collision course with the United States. The Mexican War receives scant treatment in books. Most historians approach the conflict as if it were a mere prelude to the Civil War. The Mexican cession of 1848, however, rivaled the Louisiana Purchase in importance for the sheer amount of territory acquired by the United States. The dispute over slavery-which had been rendered largely academic by the Missouri Compromise-burst forth anew as Americans now faced the realization that they must make a decision over the institution's future. The political battle over the status of slavery in these new territories was the direct cause of the Crisis of 1850 and ignited sectional differences in the decade that followed. In Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas, Richard Bruce Winders provides a concise, accessible overview of the Mexican War and argues that the Mexican War led directly to the Civil War by creating a political and societal crisis that drove a wedge between the North and the South. While on the surface the enemy was Mexico, in reality Americans were at odds with one another over the future of the nation, as the issue of annexation threatened to upset the balance between free and slave states. Winders also explains the military connections between the Mexican War and Civil War, since virtually every important commander in the Civil War-including Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant, McClellan, and Longstreet-gained his introduction to combat in Mexico. These connections are enormously significant to the way in which these generals waged war, since it was in the Mexican War that they learned their trade. Crisis in the Southwest provides readers with a clear understandin

Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

With limited money or free time, Father Stanley Francis Louis Crocchiola wrote and published 177 books and booklets pertaining to the southwest. He published this work after 19 years of researching the Civil War as the Volunteers of New Mexico lived and fought it.

Newly-available records from the Civil War in the Southwest, drawn from both Union and Confederate sources, give a much-improved understanding of that period through the words of those who shaped and participated in events at that time.

For decades before the Civil War, Southern writers and warriors had been urging the occupation and development of the American Southwest. When the rift between North and South had been finalized in secession, the Confederacy moved to extend their traditions to the west-a long-sought goal that had been frustrated by northern states. It was a common sentiment among Southerners and especially Texans that Mexico must be rescued from indolent inhabitants and granted the benefits of American civilization. Blood and Treasure, written in a readable narrative style that belies the rigorous research behind it, tells the story of the Confederacy's ambitious plan to extend a Confederate empire across the continent. Led by Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor, later a governor of Arizona, and General H. H. Sibley, Texan soldiers trekked from San Antonio to Fort Bliss in El Paso, then north along the Rio Grande to Santa Fe. Fighting both Apaches and Federal troops, the half-trained, undisciplined army met success at the Battle of Val Verde and defeat at the Battle of Apache Canyon. Finally, the Texans won the Battle of Glorieta Pass, only to lose their supply train--and eventually the campaign. Pursued and dispirited, the Confederates abandoned their dream of empire and retreated to El Paso and San Antonio. Frazier has made use of previously untapped primary sources, allowing him to present new interpretations of the famous Civil War battles in the Southwest. Using narratives of veterans of the campaign and official Confederate and Union documents, the author explains how this seemingly far-fetched fantasy of building a Confederate empire was an essential part of the Confederate strategy. Military historians will be challenged to modify traditional views of Confederate imperial ambitions. Generalists will be drawn into the fascinating saga of the soldiers' fears, despair, and struggles to survive.

For southwest Missouri, the Civil War was an unparalleled period of violence, sorrow and anger. As the torches burned the physical landscape, the depredations inflicted were also scorched upon the psyche of the people who lived through fires. Survey Carthage's battlefield for stubborn holdouts or hold vigil at the Kendrick House for innocent bystanders who were swept up into the stratagems of bushwhackers and guerrillas. Meet the Bloody Spikes, Rotten Johnny Reb and scores more figures from the region's past who continue to trouble its present.