Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 PDF Author: Andrew E. Masich
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
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 When U.S. regular troops were withdrawn in 1861 to fight in the East, the resulting power vacuum led to unprecedented violence in the West.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.

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 PDF Author: Andrew E. Masich
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book

Book Description
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.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War

The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War PDF Author: Lorien Foote
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197549985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 697

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Book Description
Every time Union armies invaded Southern territory there were unintended consequences. Military campaigns always affected the local population -- devastating farms and towns, making refugees of the inhabitants, undermining slavery. Local conditions in turn altered the course of military events. The social effects of military campaigns resonated throughout geographic regions and across time. Campaigns and battles often had a serious impact on national politics and international affairs. Not all campaigns in the Civil War had a dramatic impact on the country, but every campaign, no matter how small, had dramatic and traumatic effects on local communities. Civil War military operations did not occur in a vacuum; there was a price to be paid on many levels of society in both North and South. The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War assembles the contributions of thirty-nine leading scholars of the Civil War, each chapter advancing the central thesis that operational military history is decisively linked to the social and political history of Civil War America. The chapters cover all three major theaters of the war and include discussions of Bleeding Kansas, the Union naval blockade, the South West, American Indians, and Reconstruction. Each essay offers a particular interpretation of how one of the war's campaigns resonated in the larger world of the North and South. Taken together, these chapters illuminate how key transformations operated across national, regional, and local spheres, covering key topics such as politics, race, slavery, emancipation, gender, loyalty, and guerrilla warfare.

Crossroads of Change

Crossroads of Change PDF Author: Cori Knudten
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806167734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Encompassing nearly seven thousand acres amid the woodlands of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, the land that is now Pecos National Historical Park has witnessed thousands of years of cultural history stretching back to the Native peoples who long ago inhabited the pueblos of Pecos, then known as Cicuye. Once a trading center where Pueblo Indians, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and Plains Indians encountered one another, not always peacefully, Pecos was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1800s and, later, on the first railroad in New Mexico. It was the site of a critical Civil War battle and in the twentieth century became a tourist destination. This book tells the story of how, over five centuries, cultures and peoples converged at Pecos and transformed its environment, ultimately shaping the landscape that greets park visitors today. Spanning the period from 1540, when Spaniards first arrived, into the twenty-first century, Crossroads of Change focuses on the history of the natural and historic resources Pecos National Historical Park now protects and interprets: the ruins of Pecos Pueblo and a Spanish mission church, a stage stop along the Santa Fe Trail, the Civil War battlefield of Glorieta Pass, a twentieth-century cattle ranch, and the national park itself. In an engaging style, authors Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek detail the transformations of Pecos over time, often driven by the collision of different cultures, such as that between the Franciscan friars and Pecos Indians in the seventeenth century, and by the introduction of new animals, crops, and agricultural practices—but also by the natural forces of fire, drought, and erosion. Located on a natural trade route, Pecos has long served as a portal between different cultures and environments. Documenting this transformation over the ages, Crossroads of Change also, perhaps, shows us Pecos National Historical Park as a portal to the future.

Civil War Wests

Civil War Wests PDF Author: Adam Arenson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520283791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands. In the West, both Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wider range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Likewise, the histories of occupation, reincorporation, and expanded citizenship during Reconstruction in the South have ignored the connections to previous as well as subsequent efforts in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction into one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century"--Provided by publisher.

Illusions of Empire

Illusions of Empire PDF Author: William S. Kiser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Illusions of Empire adopts a multinational view of North American borderlands, examining the ways in which Mexico's North overlapped with the U.S. Southwest in the context of diplomacy, politics, economics, and military operations during the Civil War era. William S. Kiser examines a fascinating series of events in which a disparate group of historical actors vied for power and control along the U.S.-Mexico border: from Union and Confederate generals and presidents, to Indigenous groups, diplomatic officials, bandits, and revolutionaries, to a Mexican president, a Mexican monarch, and a French king. Their unconventional approaches to foreign relations demonstrate the complex ways that individuals influence the course of global affairs and reveal that borderlands simultaneously enable and stifle the growth of empires. This is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican source materials to tell an important story of borderlands conflict with ramifications that are still felt in the region today.

The War That Made America

The War That Made America PDF Author: Caroline E. Janney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation's greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas caught in the legal snares of the Union's hard war to African Americans pursuing landownership in the postwar years. Essayists also explore how people contested and shaped the memory of the conflict, from outright silences and evasions to the use of formal historical writing. Other contributors use comparative and transnational history to rethink key aspects of the conflict. The result is a thorough examination of Gallagher's scholarly legacy and an assessment of the present and future of the Civil War history field. Contributors are William A. Blair, Peter S. Carmichael, Andre M. Fleche, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Caroline E. Janney, Peter C. Luebke, Cynthia Nicoletti, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Kathryn J. Shively.

The Second Colorado Cavalry

The Second Colorado Cavalry PDF Author: Christopher M. Rein
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806166908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains—and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the “fire brigade” of the Trans-Mississippi Theater—a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains’ history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains.

The War Went On

The War Went On PDF Author: Brian Matthew Jordan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In recent years, Civil War veterans have emerged from historical obscurity. Inspired by recent interest in memory studies and energized by the ongoing neorevisionist turn, a vibrant new literature has given the lie to the once-obligatory lament that the postbellum lives of Civil War soldiers were irretrievable. Despite this flood of historical scholarship, fundamental questions about the essential character of Civil War veteranhood remain unanswered. Moreover, because work on veterans has often proceeded from a preoccupation with cultural memory, the Civil War’s ex-soldiers have typically been analyzed as either symbols or producers of texts. In The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, fifteen of the field’s top scholars provide a more nuanced and intimate look at the lives and experiences of these former soldiers. Essays in this collection approach Civil War veterans from oblique angles, including theater, political, and disability history, as well as borderlands and memory studies. Contributors examine the lives of Union and Confederate veterans, African American veterans, former prisoners of war, amputees, and ex-guerrilla fighters. They also consider postwar political elections, veterans’ business dealings, and even literary contests between onetime enemies and among former comrades.

Alabamians in Blue

Alabamians in Blue PDF Author: Christopher M. Rein
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Alabamians in Blue offers an in-depth scholarly examination of Alabama’s black and white Union soldiers and their contributions to the eventual success of the Union army in the western theater. Christopher M. Rein contends that the state’s anti-Confederate residents tendered an important service to the North, primarily by collecting intelligence and protecting logistical infrastructure. He highlights an underappreciated period of biracial cooperation, underwritten by massive support from the federal government. Providing a broad synthesis, Rein’s study demonstrates that southern dissenters were not passive victims but rather active participants in their own liberation. Ecological factors, including agricultural collapse under levies from both armies, may have provided the initial impetus for Union enlistment. Federal pillaging inflicted further heavy destruction on plantation agriculture. The breakdown in basic subsistence that ensued pushed Alabama’s freedmen and Unionists into federal camps in garrison cities in search of relief and the opportunity for revenge. Once in uniform, Alabama’s Union soldiers served alongside northern regiments and frustrated Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attempts to interrupt the Union supply efforts in the 1864 Atlanta campaign, which led to the collapse of Confederate arms in the western theater and the eventual Union victory. Rein describes a “hybrid warfare” of simultaneous conventional and guerilla battles, where each significantly influenced the other. He concludes that the conventional conflict both prompted and eventually ended the internecine warfare that largely marked the state’s experience of the war. A comprehensive analysis of military, social, and environmental history, Alabamians in Blue uncovers a past of biracial cooperation in the American South, and in Alabama in particular, that postwar adherents to the “Myth of the Lost Cause” have successfully suppressed until now.

The Ranger Ideal Volume 2

The Ranger Ideal Volume 2 PDF Author: Darren L. Ivey
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574417444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
They say everything is bigger in Texas, and the Lone Star State can certainly boast of immense ranches, vast oil fields, enormous cowboy hats, and larger-than-life heroes. Among the greatest of the latter are the iconic Texas Rangers, a service that has existed, in one form or another, since 1823. Established in Waco in 1968, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum continues to honor these legendary symbols of Texas and the American West. While upholding a proud heritage of duty and sacrifice, even men who wear the cinco peso badge can have their own champions. Thirty-one individuals—whose lives span more than two centuries—have been enshrined in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. In The Ranger Ideal Volume 2: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1874-1930, Darren L. Ivey presents capsule biographies of the twelve inductees who served Texas in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ivey begins with John B. Jones, who directed his Rangers through their development from state troops to professional lawmen; then covers Leander H. McNelly, John B. Armstrong, James B. Gillett, Jesse Lee Hall, George W. Baylor, Bryan Marsh, and Ira Aten—the men who were responsible for some of the Rangers’ most legendary feats. Ivey concludes with James A. Brooks, William J. McDonald, John R. Hughes, and John H. Rogers, the “Four Great Captains” who guided the Texas Rangers into the twentieth century.