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Mexican-American War

Clockwise from top: Battle of Resaca de la Palma, U.S. victory at Churubusco outside of Mexico City, Marines storming Chapultepec castle under a large U.S. flag, Battle of Cerro Gordo

Date

April 25, 1846 - February 2, 1848
(1 year, 9 months, 1 week and 1 day)

Location

Texas, New Mexico, California; Northern, Central, and Eastern Mexico; Mexico City

Result

American victory

Territorial
changes

Mexican Cession

Belligerents

United States
California Republic

Mexico

Commanders and leaders

Strength

73,532

82,000

Casualties and losses

1,733 killed

4,152 wounded[2]

11,550 dead from disease

695 missing

5,000 killed

20,000 wounded

10,000 missing

Including civilians killed by violence, military deaths from disease and accidental deaths, the Mexican death toll may have reached 25,000 and the American death toll exceeded 13,283.[3]

The Mexican-American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the Intervención estadounidense en México ( United States intervention in Mexico), was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It followed the 1845 American annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered its territory. Mexico refused to recognize the Velasco treaty, because it was signed by President Antonio López de Santa Anna while he was captured by the Texan Army during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The Republic of Texas was an independent country, but most of its Anglo-American citizens wanted to be annexed by the United States.

Sectional politics over slavery in the United States were preventing annexation because Texas would have been admitted as a slave state, upsetting the balance of power between Northern free states and Southern slave states. In the 1844 United States presidential election, Democrat James K. Polk was elected on a platform of expanding U.S. territory to Oregon, California (also a Mexican territory) and Texas; by any means, with the 1845 annexation of Texas furthering that goal. But the boundary between Texas and Mexico was disputed, with the Republic of Texas and the U.S. asserting it to be the Rio Grande and Mexico claiming it to be the more-northern Nueces River. Polk sent a diplomatic mission to Mexico in an attempt to buy the disputed territory, together with California and everything in between for US $25 million; an offer the Mexican government refused. The U.S. sent troops to the disputed Rio Grande, ignoring Mexican demands to withdraw. Mexico subsequently attacked a group of 80 soldiers on April 25, 1846, a move which Polk used to convince the Congress of the United States to declare war.

Beyond the disputed area of Texas, U.S. forces quickly occupied the regional capital of Santa Fe de Nuevo México along the upper Rio Grande. U.S. forces also moved against the province of Alta California and then turned south. The Pacific Squadron of the U.S. Navy blockaded the Pacific coast in the lower Baja California Territory. The U.S. Army, under Major General Winfield Scott, invaded the Mexican heartland and captured the capital, Mexico City, in September 1847.

Although Mexico was defeated on the battlefield, negotiating peace was a politically fraught issue. Some Mexican factions refused to consider any recognition of its loss of territory. Although Polk formally relieved his peace envoy, Nicholas Trist, of his post as negotiator, Trist ignored the order and successfully concluded the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It ended the war, and Mexico recognized the cession of present-day California, Nevada and Utah as well as parts of present-day Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. The U.S. agreed to pay $15 million for the physical damage of the war and assumed $3.25 million of debt already owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens. Mexico relinquished its claims on Texas and accepted the Rio Grande as its northern border with the United States.

The victory and territorial expansion Polk envisioned inspired patriotism among some sections of the United States, but the war and treaty drew fierce criticism for the casualties, monetary cost, and heavy-handedness. The question of how to treat the new acquisitions intensified the debate over slavery in the United States. Although the Wilmot Proviso that explicitly forbade the extension of slavery into conquered Mexican territory was not adopted by Congress, debates about it heightened sectional tensions. Some scholars see the Mexican-American War as leading to the American Civil War. Many officers who had trained at West Point gained experience in the war in Mexico and later played prominent leadership roles during the Civil War.

Mexico obtained independence from the Spanish Empire with the Treaty of Córdoba in 1821 after a decade of conflict between the royal army and insurgents for independence, with no foreign intervention. The conflict ruined the silver-mining districts of Zacatecas and Guanajuato. Mexico began as a sovereign nation with its future financial stability from its main export destroyed. Mexico briefly experimented with monarchy, but became a republic in 1824. This government was characterized by instability, and it was ill-prepared for a major international conflict when war broke out with the U.S. in 1846. Mexico had successfully resisted Spanish attempts to reconquer its former colony in the 1820s and resisted the French in the so-called Pastry War of 1838 but the secessionists' success in Texas and the Yucatan against the centralist government of Mexico showed its political weakness as the government changed hands multiple times. The Mexican military and the Catholic Church in Mexico, both privileged institutions with conservative political views, were stronger politically than the Mexican state.

The United States' 1803 Louisiana Purchase resulted in an undefined border between Spanish colonial territories and the U.S. Some of the boundary issues between the U.S. and Spain were resolved with the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1818. U.S. negotiator John Quincy Adams wanted clear possession of East Florida and establishment of U.S. claims above the 42nd parallel, while Spain sought to limit U.S. expansion into what is now the American Southwest. The U.S. sought to purchase territory from Mexico, starting in 1825, in order to settle some of these issues. U.S. President Andrew Jackson made a sustained effort to acquire northern Mexican territory, with no success.

Historian Peter Guardino states that in the war "the greatest advantage the United States had was its prosperity." With the Industrial Revolution across the Atlantic increasing the demand for cotton for textile factories, there was a large external market of a valuable commodity produced by enslaved African-American labor in the southern states. This demand helped fuel expansion into northern Mexico. Although there were political conflicts in the U.S., they were largely contained by the framework of the constitution and did not result in revolution or rebellion by 1846, but rather by sectional political conflicts. Northerners in the U.S. sought to develop the country's existing resources and expand the industrial sector without expanding the nation's territory. The existing balance of sectional interests would be disrupted by the expansion of slavery into new territory. The Democratic Party, to which President Polk belonged, in particular strongly supported expansion.

Neither colonial Mexico nor the newly sovereign Mexican state effectively controlled Mexico's far north and west. Mexico's military and diplomatic capabilities declined after it attained independence from Spain in 1821 and left the northern one-half of the country vulnerable to attacks by Comanche, Apache, and Navajo Native Americans. The Comanche, in particular, took advantage of the weakness of the Mexican state to undertake large-scale raids hundreds of miles into the country to acquire livestock for their own use and to supply an expanding market in Texas and the U.S.

Distance and hostile activity from Native Americans also made communications and trade between the heartland of Mexico and provinces such as Alta California and New Mexico difficult. As a result, New Mexico was dependent on the overland Santa Fe Trail trade with the United States at the outbreak of the war.

The Mexican government's policy of settlement of U.S. citizens in its province of Tejas was aimed at expanding control into Comanche lands, the Comancheria. But, instead of settling in the dangerous central and western parts of the province, people settled in East Texas, which held rich farmland contiguous to the southern U.S. slave states. As settlers poured in from the U.S., the Mexican government discouraged further settlement with its 1829 abolition of slavery.

U.S. President John Tyler's administration suggested a tripartite pact to settle the Oregon boundary dispute and provide for the cession of the port of San Francisco from Mexico. Lord Aberdeen declined to participate but said Britain had no objection to U.S. territorial acquisition there. The British minister in Mexico, Richard Pakenham, wrote in 1841 to Lord Palmerston urging "to establish an English population in the magnificent Territory of Upper California", saying that "no part of the World offering greater natural advantages for the establishment of an English colony ... by all means desirable ... that California, once ceasing to belong to Mexico, should not fall into the hands of any power but England ... there is some reason to believe that daring and adventurous speculators in the United States have already turned their thoughts in this direction." By the time the letter reached London, though, Sir Robert Peel's Tory government, with its Little England policy, had come to power and rejected the proposal as expensive and a potential source of conflict.

In 1842, Mexico forcibly replaced California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado with Manuel Micheltorena. Micheltorena was sent up from lower Mexico, along with an army, that had largely been recruited from Mexico's worst jails. The Californios resented this, partly because California had previously been governed by native-born Californios, partly because Micheltorena's policies were unpopular, and also because the soldiers in Micheltorena's army got a reputation for spending much of their time stealing the local Californios' chickens. Women were not considered safe from the depredations of Micheltorena's army.

Former Governor Alvarado organized a revolt in 1845, which culminated in the Battle of Providencia in Cahuenga Pass near Los Angeles. As a result of the actions of pioneer California rancher John Marsh, Micheltorena's forces were defeated.

In 1800, Spain's colonial province of Texas (Tejas) had few inhabitants, with only about 7,000 non-native settlers. The Spanish crown developed a policy of colonization to more effectively control the territory. After independence, the Mexican government implemented the policy, granting Moses Austin, a banker from Missouri, a large tract of land in Texas. Austin died before he could bring his plan of recruiting American settlers for the land to fruition, but his son, Stephen F. Austin, brought over 300 American families into Texas. This started the steady trend of migration from the United States into the Texas frontier. Austin's colony was the most successful of several colonies authorized by the Mexican government. The Mexican government intended the new settlers to act as a buffer between the Tejano residents and the Comanches, but the non-Hispanic colonists tended to settle in areas with decent farmland and trade connections with Louisiana rather than farther west where they would have been an effective buffer against the Natives.

In 1834, Mexican conservatives seized the political initiative, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna became the centralist president of Mexico. The conservative-dominated Congress abandoned the federal system, replacing it with a unitary central government that removed power from the states. Leaving politics to those in Mexico City, General Santa Anna led the Mexican army to quash the semi-independence of Texas. He had done that in Coahuila (in 1824, Mexico had merged Texas and Coahuila into the enormous state of Coahuila y Tejas). Austin called Texians to arms and they declared independence from Mexico in 1836. After Santa Anna defeated the Texians in the Battle of the Alamo, he was defeated by the Texian Army commanded by General Sam Houston and was captured at the Battle of San Jacinto. In exchange for his life Santa Anna signed a treaty with Texas President David Burnet ending the war and recognizing Texian independence. The treaty was not ratified by the Mexican Congress as it had been signed by a captive under duress. Although Mexico refused to recognize Texian independence, Texas consolidated its status as an independent republic and received official recognition from Britain, France, and the United States, which all advised Mexico not to try to reconquer the new nation. Most Texians wanted to join the United States, but the annexation of Texas was contentious in the U.S. Congress, where Whigs and Abolitionists were largely opposed. In 1845, Texas agreed to the offer of annexation by the U.S. Congress and became the 28th state on December 29, 1845, which set the stage for the conflict with Mexico.

By the Treaties of Velasco made after Texans captured General Santa Ana after the Battle of San Jacinto, the southern border of Texas was placed at the "Rio Grande del Norte." The Texans claimed this placed the southern border at the modern Rio Grande. The Mexican government disputed this placement on two grounds: first, it rejected the idea of Texas independence; and second, it claimed that the Rio Grande in the treaty was actually the Nueces River, since the current Rio Grande has always been called "Rio Bravo" in Mexico. The latter claim belied the full name of the river in Mexico, however: "Rio Bravo del Norte." The ill-fated Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 attempted to realize the claim to New Mexican territory east of the Rio Grande, but its members were captured by the Mexican Army and imprisoned. Reference to the Rio Grande boundary of Texas was omitted from the U.S. Congress's annexation resolution to help secure passage after the annexation treaty failed in the Senate. President Polk claimed the Rio Grande boundary, and when Mexico sent forces over the Rio Grande, this provoked a dispute.

In July 1845, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to Texas, and by October, Taylor commanded 3,500 Americans on the Nueces River, ready to take by force the disputed land. Polk wanted to protect the border and also coveted for the U.S. the continent clear to the Pacific Ocean. At the same time, Polk wrote to the American consul in the Mexican territory of Alta California, disclaiming American ambitions in California but offering to support independence from Mexico or voluntary accession to the United States, and warning that the United States would oppose any European attempts to take over.

To end another war scare with the United Kingdom over the Oregon Country, Polk signed the Oregon Treaty dividing the territory, angering Northern Democrats who felt he was prioritizing Southern expansion over Northern expansion.

In the winter of 1845-46, the federally commissioned explorer John C. Frémont and a group of armed men appeared in Alta California. After telling the Mexican governor and the American Consul Larkin he was merely buying supplies on the way to Oregon, he instead went to the populated area of California and visited Santa Cruz and the Salinas Valley, explaining he had been looking for a seaside home for his mother. Mexican authorities became alarmed and ordered him to leave. Frémont responded by building a fort on Gavilan Peak and raising the American flag. Larkin sent word that Frémont's actions were counterproductive. Frémont left California in March but returned to California and took control of the California Battalion following the outbreak of the Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma.

In November 1845, Polk sent John Slidell, a secret representative, to Mexico City with an offer to the Mexican government of $25 million for the Rio Grande border in Texas and Mexico's provinces of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México. U.S. expansionists wanted California to thwart any British interests in the area and to gain a port on the Pacific Ocean. Polk authorized Slidell to forgive the $3 million owed to U.S. citizens for damages caused by the Mexican War of Independence and pay another $25 to $30 million for the two territories.

Mexico was neither inclined nor able to negotiate. In 1846 alone, the presidency changed hands four times, the war ministry six times, and the finance ministry sixteen times. Despite that, Mexican public opinion and all political factions agreed that selling the territories to the United States would tarnish the national honor. Mexicans who opposed direct conflict with the United States, including President José Joaquín de Herrera, were viewed as traitors. Military opponents of de Herrera, supported by populist newspapers, considered Slidell's presence in Mexico City an insult. When de Herrera considered receiving Slidell to settle the problem of Texas annexation peacefully, he was accused of treason and deposed. After a more nationalistic government under General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga came to power, it publicly reaffirmed Mexico's claim to Texas; Slidell, convinced that Mexico should be "chastised", returned to the U.S.

The Mexican Army was a weak and divided force. Only 7 of the 19 states that formed the Mexican federation sent soldiers, armament, and money for the war effort. Santa Anna said, "the leaders of the army did their best to train the rough men who volunteered, but they could do little to inspire them with patriotism for the glorious country they were honored to serve." According to the leading Mexican conservative politician, Lucas Alamán, the "money spent on arming Mexican troops merely enabled them to fight each other and 'give the illusion' that the country possessed an army for its defense." However, an officer criticized Santa Anna's training of troops, "The cavalry was drilled only in regiments. The artillery hardly ever maneuvered and never fired a blank shot. The general in command was never present on the field of maneuvers, so that he was unable to appreciate the respective qualities of the various bodies under his command ... If any meetings of the principal commanding officers were held to discuss the operations of the campaign, it was not known, nor was it known whether any plan of campaign had been formed."

At the beginning of the war, Mexican forces were divided between the permanent forces ( permanentes) and the active militiamen ( activos). The permanent forces consisted of 12 regiments of infantry (of two battalions each), three brigades of artillery, eight regiments of cavalry, one separate squadron and a brigade of dragoons. The militia amounted to nine infantry and six cavalry regiments. In the northern territories, presidial companies ( presidiales) protected the scattered settlements. Since Mexico fought the war on its home territory, a traditional support system for troops were women, known as soldaderas. They did not participate in conventional fighting on battlefields, but some soldaderas joined the battle alongside the men. These women were involved in fighting during the defense of Mexico City and Monterey. Some women such as Dos Amandes and María Josefa Zozaya would be remembered as heroes.

The Mexican army was using surplus British muskets (such as the Brown Bess), left over from the Napoleonic Wars. While at the beginning of the war most American soldiers were still equipped with the very similar Springfield 1816 flintlock muskets, more reliable caplock models gained large inroads within the rank and file as the conflict progressed. Some U.S. troops carried more modern weapons that gave them a significant advantage over their Mexican counterparts, such as the Springfield 1841 rifle of the Mississippi Rifles and the Colt Paterson revolver of the Texas Rangers. In the later stages of the war, the U.S. Mounted Rifles were issued Colt Walker revolvers, of which the U.S. Army had ordered 1,000 in 1846. Most significantly, throughout the war, the superiority of the U.S. artillery often carried the day. While technologically Mexican and American artillery operated on the same plane, U.S. army training, as well as the quality and reliability of their logistics, gave U.S. guns and cannoneers a significant edge.

In his 1885 memoirs, former U.S. President Ulysses Grant (himself a veteran of the Mexican war) attributed Mexico's defeat to the poor quality of their army, writing:

"The Mexican army of that day was hardly an organization. The private soldier was picked from the lower class of the inhabitants when wanted; his consent was not asked; he was poorly clothed, worse fed, and seldom paid. He was turned adrift when no longer wanted. The officers of the lower grades were but little superior to the men. With all this I have seen as brave stands made by some of these men as I have ever seen made by soldiers. Now Mexico has a standing army larger than the United States. They have a military school modeled after West Point. Their officers are educated and, no doubt, very brave. The Mexican war of 1846-8 would be an impossibility in this generation."

There were significant political divisions in Mexico which seriously impeded the war effort. Inside Mexico, the conservative centralistas and liberal federalists vied for power, and at times these two factions inside Mexico's military fought each other rather than the invading U.S. Army. Santa Anna bitterly remarked, "However shameful it may be to admit this, we have brought this disgraceful tragedy upon ourselves through our interminable in-fighting."

During the conflict, presidents held office for a period of months, sometimes just weeks, or even days. Just before the outbreak of the war, liberal General José Joaquín de Herrera was president (December 1844 - December 1845) and willing to engage in talks so long as he did not appear to be caving to the U.S., but he was accused by many Mexican factions of selling out his country ( vendepatria) for considering it. He was overthrown by Conservative Mariano Paredes (December 1845 - July 1846), who left the presidency to fight the invading U.S. Army and was replaced by his vice president Nicolás Bravo (July 28, 1846 - August 4, 1846). The conservative Bravo was overthrown by federalist liberals who re-established the federal Constitution of 1824. José Mariano Salas (August 6, 1846 - December 23, 1846) served as president and held elections under the restored federalist system. General Antonio López de Santa Anna won those elections, but as was his practice, he left the administration to his vice president, who was again liberal Valentín Gómez Farías (December 23, 1846 - March 21, 1847). In February 1847, conservatives rebelled against the liberal government's attempt to take Church property to fund the war effort. In the Revolt of the Polkos, the Catholic Church and conservatives paid soldiers to rise against the liberal government. Santa Anna had to leave his campaign to return to the capital to sort out the political mess.

Santa Anna briefly held the presidency again, from March 21, 1847 - April 2, 1847. His troops were deprived of support that would allow them to continue the fight. The conservatives demanded the removal of Gómez Farías, and this was accomplished by abolishing the office of vice president. Santa Anna returned to the field, replaced in the presidency by Pedro María de Anaya (April 2, 1847 - May 20, 1847). Santa Anna returned to the presidency on May 20, 1847, when Anaya left to fight the invasion, serving until September 15, 1847. Preferring the battlefield to administration, Santa Anna left office again, leaving the office to Manuel de la Peña y Peña (September 16, 1847 - November 13, 1847).

With U.S. forces occupying the Mexican capital and much of the heartland, negotiating a peace treaty was an exigent matter, and Peña y Peña left office to do that. Pedro María Anaya returned to the presidency on November 13, 1847 - January 8, 1848. Anaya refused to sign any treaty that ceded land to the U.S., despite the situation on the ground with Americans occupying the capital, Peña y Peña resumed the presidency January 8, 1848 - June 3, 1848, during which time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, bringing the war to an end.

Polk had pledged to seek expanded territory in Oregon and Texas, as part of his campaign in 1844, but the regular army was not sufficiently large to sustain extended conflicts on two fronts. The Oregon dispute with Britain was settled peaceably by treaty, allowing U.S. forces to concentrate on the southern border.

The war was fought by regiments of regulars and various regiments, battalions, and companies of volunteers from the different states of the Union as well as Americans and some Mexicans in California and New Mexico. On the West Coast, the U.S. Navy fielded a battalion of sailors, in an attempt to recapture Los Angeles. Although the U.S. Army and Navy were not large at the outbreak of the war, the officers were generally well trained and the numbers of enlisted men fairly large compared to Mexico's. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. Army had eight regiments of infantry (three battalions each), four artillery regiments and three mounted regiments (two dragoons, one of mounted rifles). These regiments were supplemented by 10 new regiments (nine of infantry and one of cavalry) raised for one year of service by the act of Congress from February 11, 1847. A large portion of this fighting force consisted of recent immigrants. According to Tyler V. Johnson, foreign-born men amounted to 47 percent of General Taylor's total forces. In addition to a large contingent of Irish- and German-born soldiers, nearly all European states and principalities were represented. It is estimated that the U.S. Army further included 1,500 men from British North America, including French Canadians.

Although Polk hoped to avoid a protracted war over Texas, the extended conflict stretched regular army resources, necessitating the recruitment of volunteers with short-term enlistments. Some enlistments were for a year, but others were for 3 or 6 months. The best volunteers signed up for a year's service in the summer of 1846, with their enlistments expiring just when General Winfield Scott's campaign was poised to capture Mexico City. Many did not re-enlist, deciding that they would rather return home than place themselves in harm's way of disease, threat of death or injury on the battlefield, or in guerrilla warfare. Their patriotism was doubted by some in the U.S., but they were not counted as deserters. The volunteers were far less disciplined than the regular army, with many committing attacks on the civilian population, sometimes stemming from anti-Catholic and anti-Mexican racial bias. Soldiers' memoirs describe cases of looting and murder of Mexican civilians, mostly by volunteers. One officer's diary records: "We reached Burrita about 5 pm, many of the Louisiana volunteers were there, a lawless drunken rabble. They had driven away the inhabitants, taken possession of their houses, and were emulating each other in making beasts of themselves." John L. O'Sullivan, a vocal proponent of Manifest Destiny, later recalled "The regulars regarded the volunteers with importance and contempt ... [The volunteers] robbed Mexicans of their cattle and corn, stole their fences for firewood, got drunk, and killed several inoffensive inhabitants of the town in the streets." Many of the volunteers were unwanted and considered poor soldiers. The expression "Just like Gaines's army" came to refer to something useless, the phrase having originated when a group of untrained and unwilling Louisiana troops was rejected and sent back by General Taylor at the beginning of the war.

In his 1885 memoirs, Ulysses Grant assesses the U.S. armed forces facing Mexico more favorably.

The victories in Mexico were, in every instance, over vastly superior numbers. There were two reasons for this. Both General Scott and General Taylor had such armies as are not often got together. At the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca-de-la-Palma, General Taylor had a small army, but it was composed exclusively of regular troops, under the best of drill and discipline. Every officer, from the highest to the lowest, was educated in his profession, not at West Point necessarily, but in the camp, in garrison, and many of them in wars with Natives. The rank and file were probably inferior, as material out of which to make an army, to the volunteers that participated in all the later battles of the war; but they were brave men, and then drill and discipline brought out all there was in them. A better army, man for man, probably never faced an enemy than the one commanded by General Taylor in the earliest two engagements of the Mexican war. The volunteers who followed were of better material, but without drill or discipline at the start. They were associated with so many disciplined men and professionally educated officers, that when they went into engagements it was with a confidence they would not have felt otherwise. They became soldiers themselves almost at once. All these conditions we would enjoy again in case of war.

The U.S. had been an independent country since the American Revolution, and it was a strongly divided country along sectional lines. Enlarging the country, particularly through armed combat against a sovereign nation, deepened sectional divisions. Polk had narrowly won the popular vote in the 1844 presidential election and decisively won the Electoral College, but with the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of war in 1846, Polk's Democrats lost the House of Representatives to the Whig Party, which opposed the war. Unlike Mexico, which had weak formal state institutions, chaotic changes in government, and a military that regularly intervened in politics, the U.S. generally kept its political divisions within the bounds of the institutions of governance.

A few days after the Thornton Affair, the Siege of Fort Texas began on May 3, 1846. Mexican artillery at Matamoros opened fire on Fort Texas, which replied with its own guns. The bombardment continued for 160 hours and expanded as Mexican forces gradually surrounded the fort. Thirteen U.S. soldiers were injured during the bombardment, and two were killed. Among the dead was Jacob Brown, after whom the fort was later named.

On May 8, 1846, Zachary Taylor and 2,400 troops arrived to relieve the fort. However, General Arista rushed north with a force of 3,400 and intercepted him about 5 miles (8 km) north of the Rio Grande River, near modern-day Brownsville, Texas. The U.S. Army employed "flying artillery", their term for horse artillery, a mobile light artillery mounted on horse carriages with the entire crew riding horses into battle. The fast-firing artillery and highly mobile fire support had a devastating effect on the Mexican army. In contrast to the "flying artillery" of the Americans, the Mexican cannons at the Battle of Palo Alto had lower-quality gunpowder that fired at velocities slow enough to make it possible for American soldiers to dodge artillery rounds. The Mexicans replied with cavalry skirmishes and their own artillery. The U.S. flying artillery somewhat demoralized the Mexican side, and seeking terrain more to their advantage, the Mexicans retreated to the far side of a dry riverbed during the night and prepared for the next battle. It provided a natural fortification, but during the retreat, Mexican troops were scattered, making communication difficult.

During the Battle of Resaca de la Palma on May 9, 1846, the two sides engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The U.S. Cavalry managed to capture the Mexican artillery, causing the Mexican side to retreat-a retreat that turned into a rout. Fighting on unfamiliar terrain, his troops fleeing in retreat, Arista found it impossible to rally his forces. Mexican casualties were significant, and the Mexicans were forced to abandon their artillery and baggage. Fort Brown inflicted additional casualties as the withdrawing troops passed by the fort, and additional Mexican soldiers drowned trying to swim across the Rio Grande. Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and began his series of battles in Mexican territory.

Polk received word of the Thornton Affair, which, added to the Mexican government's rejection of Slidell, Polk believed, constituted a casus belli. His message to Congress on May 11, 1846, claimed that "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil."

The U.S. Congress approved the declaration of war on May 13, 1846, after a few hours of debate, with southern Democrats in strong support. Sixty-seven Whigs voted against the war on a key slavery amendment, but on the final passage only 14 Whigs voted no, including Rep. John Quincy Adams. Later, a freshman Whig Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, challenged Polk's assertion that American blood had been shed on American soil, calling it "a bold falsification of history".

Regarding the beginning of the war, Ulysses S. Grant, who had opposed the war but served as an army lieutenant in Taylor's army, claims in his Personal Memoirs (1885) that the main goal of the U.S. Army's advance from Nueces River to the Rio Grande was to provoke the outbreak of war without attacking first, to debilitate any political opposition to the war.

The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory farthest from the Mexican settlements, was not sufficient to provoke hostilities. We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, "Whereas, war exists by the acts of, etc.," and prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were, but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. ... Mexico showing no willingness to come to the Nueces to drive the invaders from her soil, it became necessary for the "invaders" to approach to within a convenient distance to be struck. Accordingly, preparations were begun for moving the army to the Rio Grande, to a point near Matamoras [sic]. It was desirable to occupy a position near the largest centre of population possible to reach, without absolutely invading territory to which we set up no claim whatever.

In Mexico, although President Paredes issued a manifesto on May 23, 1846, and a declaration of a defensive war on April 23, both of which are considered by some the de facto start of the war, the Mexican Congress officially declared war on July 7, 1846.

In the United States, increasingly divided by sectional rivalry, the war was a partisan issue and an essential element in the origins of the American Civil War. Most Whigs in the North and South opposed it; most Democrats supported it. Southern Democrats, animated by a popular belief in Manifest Destiny, supported it in hope of adding slave-owning territory to the South and avoiding being outnumbered by the faster-growing North. John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, coined this phrase in its context, stating that it must be "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

Northern antislavery elements feared the expansion of the Southern Slave Power; Whigs generally wanted to strengthen the economy with industrialization, not expand it with more land. Among the most vocal opposing the war in the House of Representatives was former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, a representative of Massachusetts. Adams had first voiced concerns about expanding into Mexican territory in 1836 when he opposed Texas annexation following its de facto independence from Mexico. He continued this argument in 1846 for the same reason. War with Mexico would add new slavery territory to the nation. When the question to go to war with Mexico came to a vote on May 13, 1846, Adams spoke a resounding "No!" in the chamber. Only 13 others followed his lead. Despite that opposition, he later voted for war appropriations.

Fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln contested Polk's causes for the war. Polk had said that Mexico had "shed American blood upon American soil". Lincoln submitted eight " Spot Resolutions", demanding that Polk state the exact spot where Thornton had been attacked and American blood shed, and to clarify whether that location was American soil or if it had been claimed by Spain and Mexico. Lincoln, too, did not actually stop money for men or supplies in the war effort.

Whig Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio gave a long speech indicting presidential war in 1847. In the Senate February 11, 1847, Whig leader Robert Toombs of Georgia declared: "This war is nondescript ... We charge the President with usurping the war-making power ... with seizing a country ... which had been for centuries, and was then in the possession of the Mexicans. ... Let us put a check upon this lust of dominion. We had territory enough, Heaven knew." Democratic Representative David Wilmot introduced the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit slavery in new territory acquired from Mexico. Wilmot's proposal passed the House but not the Senate.

Northern abolitionists attacked the war as an attempt by slave-owners to strengthen the grip of slavery and thus ensure their continued influence in the federal government. Prominent artists and writers opposed the war, including James Russell Lowell, whose works on the subject " The Present Crisis" and the satirical The Biglow Papers were immediately popular. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson also criticized the war. Thoreau, who served jail time for refusing to pay a tax that would support the war effort, turned a lecture into an essay now known as Civil Disobedience. Emerson was succinct, predicting that, "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as a man who swallowed the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." Events proved him right, in a fashion, as arguments over the expansion of slavery in the lands seized from Mexico would fuel the drift to civil war just a dozen years later. The New England Workingmen's Association condemned the war, and some Irish and German immigrants defected from the U.S. Army and formed the Saint Patrick's Battalion to fight for Mexico.

Besides alleging that the actions of Mexican military forces within the disputed boundary lands north of the Rio Grande constituted an attack on American soil, the war's advocates viewed the territories of New Mexico and California as only nominally Mexican possessions with very tenuous ties to Mexico. They saw the territories as unsettled, ungoverned, and unprotected frontier lands, whose non-aboriginal population represented a substantial American component. Moreover, the territories were feared by Americans to be under imminent threat of acquisition by America's rival on the continent, the British.

President Polk reprised these arguments in his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 7, 1847. He scrupulously detailed his administration's position on the origins of the conflict, the measures the U.S. had taken to avoid hostilities, and the justification for declaring war. He also elaborated upon the many outstanding financial claims by American citizens against Mexico and argued that, in view of the country's insolvency, the cession of some large portion of its northern territories was the only indemnity realistically available as compensation. This helped to rally congressional Democrats to his side, ensuring passage of his war measures and bolstering support for the war in the U.S.

The coverage of the war was an important development in the U.S., with journalists as well as letter-writing soldiers giving the public in the U.S. "their first-ever independent news coverage of warfare from home or abroad." During the war, inventions such as the telegraph created new means of communication that updated people with the latest news from the reporters on the scene. The most important of these was George Wilkins Kendall, a Northerner who wrote for the New Orleans Picayune, and whose collected Dispatches from the Mexican War constitute an important primary source for the conflict. With more than a decade's experience reporting urban crime, the "penny press" realized the public's voracious demand for astounding war news. Moreover, Shelley Streetby demonstrates that the print revolution, which preceded the U.S.-Mexican War, made it possible for the distribution of cheap newspapers throughout the country. This was the first time in U.S. history that accounts by journalists instead of opinions of politicians had great influence in shaping people's opinions about and attitudes toward a war. Along with written accounts of the war, war artists provided a visual dimension to the war at the time and immediately afterward. Carl Nebel's visual depictions of the war are well known.

By getting constant reports from the battlefield, Americans became emotionally united as a community. News about the war caused extraordinary popular excitement. In the spring of 1846, news about Taylor's victory at Palo Alto brought up a large crowd that met in the cotton textile town of Lowell, Massachusetts. In Chicago, a large concourse of citizens gathered in April 1847 to celebrate the victory of Buena Vista. New York celebrated the twin victories at Veracruz and Buena Vista in May 1847. Generals Taylor and Scott became heroes for their people and later became presidential candidates. Polk had pledged to be a one-term president, but his last official act was to attend Taylor's inauguration as president.

U.S. invasions on Mexico's periphery

After the declaration of war on May 13, 1846, United States Army General Stephen W. Kearny moved southwest from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in June 1846 with about 1,700 men in his Army of the West. Kearny's orders were to secure the territories Nuevo México and Alta California.

In Santa Fe, Governor Manuel Armijo wanted to avoid battle, but on August 9, Colonel Diego Archuleta and militia officers Manuel Chaves and Miguel Pino forced him to muster a defense. Armijo set up a position in Apache Canyon, a narrow pass about 10 miles (16 km) southeast of the city. However, on August 14, before the American army was even in view, he decided not to fight. An American named James Magoffin claimed he had convinced Armijo and Archuleta to follow this course; an unverified story says he bribed Armijo. When Pino, Chaves, and some of the militiamen insisted on fighting, Armijo ordered the cannon pointed at them. The New Mexican army retreated to Santa Fe, and Armijo fled to Chihuahua.

Kearny and his troops encountered no Mexican forces when they arrived on August 15. Kearny and his force entered Santa Fe and claimed the New Mexico Territory for the United States without a shot fired. Kearny declared himself the military governor of the New Mexico Territory on August 18 and established a civilian government. American officers drew up a temporary legal system for the territory called the Kearny Code.

Kearny then took the remainder of his army west to Alta California; he left Colonel Sterling Price in command of U.S. forces in New Mexico. He appointed Charles Bent as New Mexico's first territorial governor. Following Kearny's departure, dissenters in Santa Fe plotted a Christmas uprising. When the plans were discovered by the U.S. authorities, the dissenters postponed the uprising. They attracted numerous Native allies, including Puebloans, who also wanted to push the Americans from the territory. On the morning of January 19, 1847, the insurrectionists began the revolt in Don Fernando de Taos, present-day Taos, New Mexico, which later gave it the name the Taos Revolt. They were led by Pablo Montoya, a New Mexican, and Tomás Romero, a Taos pueblo Native also known as Tomasito (Little Thomas).

Romero led a Native American force to the house of Governor Charles Bent, where they broke down the door, shot Bent with arrows, and scalped him in front of his family. They moved on, leaving Bent still alive. With his wife Ignacia and children, and the wives of friends Kit Carson and Thomas Boggs, the group escaped by digging through the adobe walls of their house into the one next door. When the insurgents discovered the party, they killed Bent but left the women and children unharmed.

The next day a large armed force of approximately 500 New Mexicans and Pueblo attacked and laid siege to Simeon Turley's mill in Arroyo Hondo, several miles outside of Taos. Charles Autobees, an employee at the mill, saw the men coming. He rode to Santa Fe for help from the occupying U.S. forces. Eight to ten mountain men were left at the mill for defense. After a day-long battle, only two of the mountain men survived, John David Albert and Thomas Tate Tobin, Autobees' half-brother. Both escaped separately on foot during the night. The same day New Mexican insurgents killed seven American traders passing through the village of Mora. At most, 15 Americans were killed in both actions on January 20.

The U.S. military moved quickly to quash the revolt; Colonel Price led more than 300 U.S. troops from Santa Fe to Taos, together with 65 volunteers, including a few New Mexicans, organized by Ceran St. Vrain, the business partner of William and Charles Bent. Along the way, the combined forces beat back a force of some 1,500 New Mexicans and Pueblo at Santa Cruz de la Cañada and at Embudo Pass. The insurgents retreated to Taos Pueblo, where they took refuge in the thick-walled adobe church. During the ensuing battle, the U.S. breached a wall of the church and directed cannon fire into the interior, inflicting many casualties and killing about 150 rebels. They captured 400 more men after close hand-to-hand fighting. Only seven Americans died in the battle.

A separate force of U.S. troops under captains Israel R. Hendley and Jesse I. Morin campaigned against the rebels in Mora. The First Battle of Mora ended in a New Mexican victory. The Americans attacked again in the Second Battle of Mora and won, which ended their operations against Mora. New Mexican rebels engaged U.S. forces three more times in the following months. The actions are known as the Battle of Red River Canyon, the Battle of Las Vegas, and the Battle of Cienega Creek. After the U.S. forces won each battle, the New Mexicans and Natives ended open warfare.

Word of Congress' declaration of war reached California by August 1846. American consul Thomas O. Larkin, stationed in Monterey, worked successfully during the events in that vicinity to avoid bloodshed between Americans and the Mexican military garrison commanded by General José Castro, the senior military officer in California.

Captain John C. Frémont, leading a U.S. Army topographical expedition to survey the Great Basin, entered Sacramento Valley in December 1845. Frémont's party was at Upper Klamath Lake in the Oregon Territory when it received word that war between Mexico and the U.S. was imminent; the party then returned to California.

Mexico had issued a proclamation that unnaturalized foreigners were no longer permitted to have land in California and were subject to expulsion. With rumors swirling that General Castro was massing an army against them, American settlers in the Sacramento Valley banded together to meet the threat. On June 14, 1846, 34 American settlers seized control of the undefended Mexican government outpost of Sonoma to forestall Castro's plans. One settler created the Bear Flag and raised it over Sonoma Plaza. Within a week, 70 more volunteers joined the rebels' force, which grew to nearly 300 in early July. This event, led by William B. Ide, became known as the Bear Flag Revolt.

On June 25, Frémont's party arrived to assist in an expected military confrontation. San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, was occupied by the Bear Flaggers on July 2. On July 5, Frémont's California Battalion was formed by combining his forces with many of the rebels.

Commodore John D. Sloat, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Squadron, near Mazatlan, Mexico, had received orders to seize San Francisco Bay and blockade California ports when he was positive that war had begun. Sloat set sail for Monterey, reaching it on July 1. Sloat, upon hearing of the events in Sonoma and Frémont's involvement, erroneously believed Frémont to be acting on orders from Washington and ordered his forces to occupy Monterey on July 7 and raise the U.S. flag. On July 9, 70 sailors and Marines landed at Yerba Buena and raised the American flag. Later that day in Sonoma, the Bear Flag was lowered, and the American flag was raised in its place.

On Sloat's orders, Frémont brought 160 volunteers to Monterey, in addition to the California Battalion. On July 15, Sloat transferred his command of the Pacific Squadron to Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who was more militarily aggressive. He mustered the willing members of the California Battalion into military service with Frémont in command. Stockton ordered Frémont to San Diego to prepare to move northward to Los Angeles. As Frémont landed, Stockton's 360 men arrived in San Pedro. General Castro and Governor Pío Pico wrote farewells and fled separately to the Mexican state of Sonora.

Stockton's army entered Los Angeles unopposed on August 13, whereupon he sent a report to the secretary of state that "California is entirely free from Mexican dominion." Stockton, however, left a tyrannical officer in charge of Los Angeles with a small force. The Californios under the leadership of José María Flores, acting on their own and without federal help from Mexico, in the Siege of Los Angeles, forced the American garrison to retreat on September 29. They also forced small U.S. garrisons in San Diego and Santa Barbara to flee.

Captain William Mervine landed 350 sailors and Marines at San Pedro on October 7. They were ambushed and repulsed at the Battle of Dominguez Rancho by Flores' forces in less than an hour. Four Americans died, with 8 severely injured. Stockton arrived with reinforcements at San Pedro, which increased the American forces there to 800. He and Mervine then set up a base of operations at San Diego.

Meanwhile, Kearny and his force of about 115 men, who had performed a grueling march across the Sonoran Desert, crossed the Colorado River in late November 1846. Stockton sent a 35-man patrol from San Diego to meet them. On December 7, 100 lancers under General Andrés Pico (brother of the governor), tipped off and lying in wait, fought Kearny's army of about 150 at the Battle of San Pasqual, where 22 of Kearny's men (one of whom later died of wounds), including three officers, were killed in 30 minutes of fighting. The wounded Kearny and his bloodied force pushed on until they had to establish a defensive position on "Mule Hill". However, General Pico kept the hill under siege for four days until a 215-man American relief force arrived.

Frémont and the 428-man California Battalion arrived in San Luis Obispo on December 14 and Santa Barbara on December 27. On December 28, a 600-man American force under Kearny began a 150-mile march to Los Angeles. Flores then moved his ill-equipped 500-man force to a 50-foot-high bluff above the San Gabriel River. On January 8, 1847, the Stockton-Kearny army defeated the Californio force in the two-hour Battle of Rio San Gabriel. That same day, Frémont's force arrived at San Fernando. The next day, January 9, the Stockton-Kearny forces fought and won the Battle of La Mesa. On January 10, the U.S. Army entered Los Angeles to no resistance.

On January 12, Frémont and two of Pico's officers agreed to terms for a surrender. Articles of Capitulation were signed on January 13 by Frémont, Andrés Pico and six others at a ranch at Cahuenga Pass (modern-day North Hollywood). This became known as the Treaty of Cahuenga, which marked the end of armed resistance in California.

Entering the Gulf of California, Independence, , and seized La Paz, then captured and burned the small Mexican fleet at Guaymas on October 19, 1847. Within a month, they cleared the gulf of hostile ships, destroying or capturing 30 vessels. Later, their sailors and Marines captured the port of Mazatlán on November 11, 1847. After upper California was secure, most of the Pacific Squadron proceeded down the California coast, capturing all major cities of the Baja California Territory and capturing or destroying nearly all Mexican vessels in the Gulf of California.

A Mexican campaign under Manuel Pineda Muñoz to retake the various captured ports resulted in several small clashes and two sieges in which the Pacific Squadron ships provided artillery support. U.S. garrisons remained in control of the ports. Following reinforcement, Lt. Col. Henry S. Burton marched out. His forces rescued captured Americans, captured Pineda, and on March 31 defeated and dispersed remaining Mexican forces at the Skirmish of Todos Santos, unaware that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed in February 1848 and a truce agreed to on March 6. When the U.S. garrisons were evacuated to Monterey following the treaty ratification, many Mexicans went with them: those who had supported the U.S. cause and had thought Lower California would also be annexed along with Upper California.

Led by Zachary Taylor, 2,300 U.S. troops crossed the Rio Grande after some initial difficulties in obtaining river transport. His soldiers occupied the city of Matamoros, then Camargo (where the soldiery suffered the first of many problems with disease) and then proceeded south and besieged the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León. The hard-fought Battle of Monterrey resulted in serious losses on both sides. The U.S. light artillery was ineffective against the stone fortifications of the city, as the American forces attacked in frontal assaults. The Mexican forces under General Pedro de Ampudia repulsed Taylor's best infantry division at Fort Teneria.

American soldiers, including many West Point graduates, had never engaged in urban warfare before, and they marched straight down the open streets, where they were annihilated by Mexican defenders well-hidden in Monterrey's thick adobe homes. They quickly learned, and two days later, they changed their urban warfare tactics. Texan soldiers had fought in a Mexican city before (the Siege of Béxar in December 1835) and advised Taylor's generals that the Americans needed to " mouse hole" through the city's homes. They needed to punch holes in the side or roofs of the homes and fight hand to hand inside the structures. Mexicans called the Texas soldiers the Diabólicos Tejanos (the Devil Texans). This method proved successful. Eventually, these actions drove and trapped Ampudia's men into the city's central plaza, where howitzer shelling forced Ampudia to negotiate. Taylor agreed to allow the Mexican Army to evacuate and to an eight-week armistice in return for the surrender of the city. Taylor broke the armistice and occupied the city of Saltillo, southwest of Monterrey. Santa Anna blamed the loss of Monterrey and Saltillo on Ampudia and demoted him to command a small artillery battalion. Similarly, Polk blamed Taylor both for suffering heavy losses and failing to imprison Ampudia's entire force. Taylor's army was subsequently stripped of most of its troops in order to support the coming coastal operations by Scott against Veracruz and the Mexican heartland.

On February 22, 1847, having heard of this weakness from the written orders found on an ambushed U.S. scout, Santa Anna seized the initiative and marched Mexico's entire army north to fight Taylor with 20,000 men, hoping to win a smashing victory before Scott could invade from the sea. The two armies met and fought the largest battle of the war at the Battle of Buena Vista. Taylor, with 4,600 men, had entrenched at a mountain pass called La Angostura, or "the narrows", several miles south of Buena Vista ranch. Santa Anna, having little logistics to supply his army, suffered desertions all the long march north and arrived with only 15,000 men in a tired state.

Initial reports of the battle, as well as propaganda from the Santanistas, credited the victory to the Mexicans, much to the joy of the Mexican populace, but rather than attack the next day and finish the battle, Santa Anna retreated, losing men along the way, having heard word of rebellion and upheaval in Mexico City. Taylor was left in control of part of northern Mexico, and Santa Anna later faced criticism for his withdrawal. Mexican and American military historians alike agree that the U.S. Army could likely have been defeated if Santa Anna had fought the battle to its finish.

Polk mistrusted Taylor, who he felt had shown incompetence in the Battle of Monterrey by agreeing to the armistice. Taylor later used the Battle of Buena Vista as the centerpiece of his successful 1848 presidential campaign.

Northwestern Mexico was essentially tribal Native territory, but on November 21, 1846, the Bear Springs Treaty was signed, ending a large-scale insurrection by the Ute, Zuni, Moquis, and Navajo tribes. In December 1846, after the successful conquest of New Mexico, part of Kearney's Army of the West, the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers, moved into modern-day northwest Mexico. They were led by Alexander W. Doniphan, continuing what ended up being a year-long 5,500 mile campaign. It was described as rivaling Xenophon's march across Anatolia during the Greco-Persian Wars.

On Christmas day, they won the Battle of El Brazito, outside the modern-day El Paso, Texas. On March 1, 1847, Doniphan occupied Chihuahua City. British consul John Potts did not want to allow Doniphan to search Governor Trías's mansion and unsuccessfully asserted it was under British protection. American merchants in Chihuahua wanted the American force to stay in order to protect their business. Major William Gilpin advocated a march on Mexico City and convinced a majority of officers, but Doniphan subverted this plan. Then in late April, Taylor ordered the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers to leave Chihuahua and join him at Saltillo. The American merchants either followed or returned to Santa Fe. Along the way, the townspeople of Parras enlisted Doniphan's aid against a Native raiding party that had taken children, horses, mules, and money. The Missouri Volunteers finally made their way to Matamoros, from which they returned to Missouri by water.

Southern Mexico had a large indigenous population and was geographically distant from the capital, over which the central government had weak control. Yucatán in particular had closer ties to Cuba and to the United States than it did to central Mexico. On a number of occasions in the early era of the Mexican Republic, Yucatán seceded from the federation. There were also rivalries between regional elites, with one faction based in Mérida and the other in Campeche. These issues factored into the Mexican-American War, as the U. S. had designs on this part of the coast.

The U.S. Navy contributed to the war by controlling the coast and clearing the way for U.S. troops and supplies, especially to Mexico's main port of Veracruz. Even before hostilities began in the disputed northern region, the U.S. Navy created a blockade. Given the shallow waters of that portion of the coast, the U.S. Navy needed ships with a shallow draft rather than large frigates. Since the Mexican Navy was almost non-existent, the U.S. Navy could operate unimpeded in gulf waters. The U.S. fought two battles in Tabasco in October 1846 and in June 1847.

Scott's invasion of Mexico's heartland

Rather than reinforce Taylor's army for a continued advance, President Polk sent a second army under General Winfield Scott. Polk had decided that the way to bring the war to an end was to invade the Mexican heartland from the coast. General Scott's army was transported to the port of Veracruz by sea to begin an invasion to take the Mexican capital. On March 9, 1847, Scott performed the first major amphibious landing in U.S. history in preparation for a siege. A group of 12,000 volunteer and regular soldiers successfully offloaded supplies, weapons, and horses near the walled city using specially designed landing crafts. Included in the invading force were several future generals: Robert E. Lee, George Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Veracruz was defended by Mexican General Juan Morales with 3,400 men. Mortars and naval guns under Commodore Matthew C. Perry were used to reduce the city walls and harass defenders. The bombardment on March 24, 1847, opened in the walls of Veracruz a thirty-foot gap. The defenders in the city replied with their own artillery, but the extended barrage broke the will of the Mexicans, who faced a numerically superior force, and they surrendered the city after 12 days under siege. U.S. troops suffered 80 casualties, while the Mexicans had around 180 killed and wounded, with hundreds of civilians killed. During the siege, the U.S. soldiers began to fall victim to yellow fever.

Santa Anna allowed Scott's army to march inland, counting on yellow fever and other tropical diseases to take their toll before Santa Anna chose a place to engage the enemy. Mexico had used this tactic before, including when Spain attempted to reconquer Mexico in 1829. Disease could be a decisive factor in the war. Santa Anna was from Veracruz, so he was on his home territory, knew the terrain, and had a network of allies. He could draw on local resources to feed his hungry army and gain intelligence on the enemy's movements. From his experience in the northern battles on open terrain, Santa Anna sought to negate the U.S. Army's primary advantage, its use of artillery.

Santa Anna chose Cerro Gordo as the place to engage the U.S. troops, calculating the terrain would offer the maximum advantage for the Mexican forces. Scott marched westward on April 2, 1847, toward Mexico City with 8,500 initially healthy troops, while Santa Anna set up a defensive position in a canyon around the main road and prepared fortifications. Santa Anna had entrenched with what the U.S. Army believed were 12,000 troops but in fact was around 9,000. He had artillery trained on the road where he expected Scott to appear. However, Scott had sent 2,600 mounted dragoons ahead, and they reached the pass on April 12. The Mexican artillery prematurely fired on them and therefore revealed their positions, beginning the skirmish.

Instead of taking the main road, Scott's troops trekked through the rough terrain to the north, setting up his artillery on the high ground and quietly flanking the Mexicans. Although by then aware of the positions of U.S. troops, Santa Anna and his troops were unprepared for the onslaught that followed. In the battle fought on April 18, the Mexican army was routed. The U.S. Army suffered 400 casualties, while the Mexicans suffered over 1,000 casualties with 3,000 taken prisoner. In August 1847, Captain Kirby Smith, of Scott's 3rd Infantry, reflected on the resistance of the Mexican army:

They can do nothing and their continued defeats should convince them of it. They have lost six great battles; we have captured six hundred and eight cannon, nearly one hundred thousand stands of arms, made twenty thousand prisoners, have the greatest portion of their country and are fast advancing on their Capital which must be ours,-yet they refuse to treat [i.e., negotiate terms]!

The U.S. Army had expected a quick collapse of the Mexican forces. Santa Anna, however, was determined to fight to the end, and Mexican soldiers continued to regroup after battles to fight yet again.

With guerrillas harassing his line of communications back to Veracruz, Scott decided not to weaken his army to defend Puebla but, leaving only a garrison at Puebla to protect the sick and injured recovering there, advanced on Mexico City on August 7 with his remaining force. The capital was laid open in a series of battles around the right flank of the city defenses, the Battle of Contreras and Battle of Churubusco. After Churubusco, fighting halted for an armistice and peace negotiations, which broke down on September 6, 1847. With the subsequent battles of Molino del Rey and of Chapultepec, and the storming of the city gates, the capital was occupied. Scott became military governor of occupied Mexico City. His victories in this campaign made him an American national hero.

The Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 was a siege on the castle of Chapultepec, built on a hill in Mexico City in the colonial era. At this time, this castle was a renowned military school in the capital. After the battle, which ended in a victory for the U.S., the legend of "Los Niños Héroes" was born. Although not confirmed by historians, six military cadets between the ages of 13 and 17 stayed in the school instead of evacuating. They decided to stay and fight for Mexico. These Niños Héroes (boy heroes) became icons in Mexico's patriotic pantheon. Rather than surrender to the U.S. Army, some military cadets leaped from the castle walls. A cadet named Juan Escutia wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death.

In late September 1847, Santa Anna made one last attempt to defeat the U.S. Army, by cutting them off from the coast. General Joaquín Rea began the Siege of Puebla, soon joined by Santa Anna. Scott had left some 2,400 soldiers in Puebla, of whom around 400 were fit. After the fall of Mexico City, Santa Anna hoped to rally Puebla's civilian population against the U.S. soldiers under siege and subject to guerrilla attacks. Before the Mexican army could wipe out the Americans in Puebla, more troops landed in Veracruz under the command of Brigadier General Joseph Lane. At Puebla, they sacked the town. Santa Anna was not able to provision his troops, who effectively dissolved as a fighting force to forage for food. Puebla was relieved by Lane on October 12, following his defeat of Santa Anna at the Battle of Huamantla on October 9. The battle was Santa Anna's last. Following the defeat, the new Mexican government led by Manuel de la Peña y Peña asked Santa Anna to turn over command of the army to General José Joaquín de Herrera.

Following the capture of the capital, the Mexican government moved to the temporary capital at Querétaro. In Mexico City, U.S. forces became an army of occupation and subject to stealth attacks from the urban population. Conventional warfare gave way to guerrilla warfare by Mexicans defending their homeland. They inflicted significant casualties on the U.S. Army, particularly on soldiers slow to keep up.

General Scott sent about a quarter of his strength to secure his line of communications to Veracruz from the Light Corps of General Rea and other Mexican guerrilla forces that had made stealth attacks since May. Mexican guerrillas often tortured and mutilated the bodies of the U.S. troops, as revenge and warning. Americans interpreted these acts not as Mexicans' defense of their patria, but as evidence of Mexicans' brutality as racial inferiors. For their part, U.S. soldiers took revenge on Mexicans for the attacks, whether or not they were individually suspected of guerrilla acts.

Scott viewed guerrilla attacks as contrary to the "laws of war" and threatened the property of populations that appeared to harbor the guerrillas. Captured guerrillas were to be shot, including helpless prisoners, with the reasoning that the Mexicans did the same. Historian Peter Guardino contends that the U.S. Army command was complicit in the attacks against Mexican civilians. By threatening the civilian populations' homes, property, and families with burning whole villages, looting, and raping women, the U.S. Army separated guerrillas from their base. "Guerrillas cost the Americans dearly, but indirectly cost Mexican civilians more."

Scott strengthened the garrison of Puebla and by November had added a 1,200-man garrison at Jalapa, established 750-man posts along the main route between the port of Veracruz and the capital, at the pass between Mexico City and Puebla at Rio Frio, at Perote and San Juan on the road between Jalapa and Puebla, and at Puente Nacional between Jalapa and Veracruz. He had also detailed an anti-guerrilla brigade under Lane to carry the war to the Light Corps and other guerrillas. He ordered that convoys would travel with at least 1,300-man escorts. Victories by Lane over the Light Corps at Atlixco (October 18, 1847), at Izúcar de Matamoros (November 23, 1847), and at Galaxara Pass (November 24, 1847) weakened General Rea's forces.

Later a raid against the guerrillas of Padre Jarauta at Zacualtipan (February 25, 1848) further reduced guerrilla raids on the American line of communications. After the two governments concluded a truce to await ratification of the peace treaty, on March 6, 1848, formal hostilities ceased. However, some bands continued in defiance of the Mexican government until the U.S. Army's evacuation in August. Some were suppressed by the Mexican Army or, like Padre Jarauta, executed.

Desertion was a major problem for both armies. In the Mexican Army, desertions depleted forces on the eve of battle. Most soldiers were peasants who had a loyalty to their village and family but not to the generals who had conscripted them. Often hungry and ill, underequipped, only partially trained, and under-paid, the soldiers were held in contempt by their officers and had little reason to fight the Americans. Looking for their opportunity, many slipped away from camp to find their way back to their home village.

Hundreds of U.S. deserters went over to the Mexican side. Nearly all were recent immigrants from Europe with weak ties to the U.S. The Mexicans issued broadsides and leaflets enticing U.S. soldiers with promises of money, land bounties, and officers' commissions. Mexican guerrillas shadowed the U.S. Army and captured men who took unauthorized leave or fell out of the ranks. The guerrillas coerced these men to join the Mexican ranks. The generous promises proved illusory for most deserters, who risked execution if captured by U.S. forces.

The most famous group of deserters from the U. S. Army, was the Saint Patrick's Battalion or ( San Patricios), composed primarily of several hundred immigrant soldiers, the majority Catholic Irish and German immigrants, who deserted the U.S. Army because of ill-treatment or sympathetic leanings to fellow Mexican Catholics and joined the Mexican army. The battalion also included Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and Mexican people, many of whom were members of the Catholic Church.

Most of the battalion were killed in the Battle of Churubusco; about 100 were captured by the U.S., and roughly half of the San Patricios were tried and were hanged as deserters following their capture at Churubusco in August 1847. The leader, John Riley, was branded. A bust of John Riley and a plaque on the façade of a building in Plaza San Jacinto, San Angel commemorates the place where they were hanged.

End of war, terms of peace

The U.S. forces had gone from being an army of conquest on the periphery for territory it desired to incorporate, to an invading force in central Mexico, potentially making it an army of long-term occupation. Mexico did not necessarily have to sign a peace treaty but could have continued with long-term guerrilla warfare against the U.S. Army. However, it could not expel the invaders, so negotiating a treaty became more necessary. Polk's wish for a short war of conquest against a perceived weak enemy with no will to fight had turned into a long and bloody conflict in Mexico's heartland. Negotiating a treaty was in the best interest of the United States. It was not easy to achieve. Polk lost confidence in his negotiator Nicholas Trist and dismissed him as peace negotiations dragged on. Trist ignored the fact that he no longer had the authorization to act for the United States. When Trist managed to get yet another Mexican government to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Polk was presented with an accomplished fact and decided to take it to Congress for ratification. Ratification was fraught, since the Democrats had lost the elections of 1846, and Whigs opposed to the war were now in ascendance.

Having won a decisive victory, the U.S. was divided on what the peace should entail. Now that the U.S. had gone far beyond the territorial gains it initially envisioned by invading central Mexico with its dense population, the question was raised whether to annex the entirety of Mexico. After the Wilmot Proviso, there was a lessening of fervor for the idea, but the taking of Mexico City had revived enthusiasm. There were fierce objections in Congress to that on racial grounds. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued that absorbing Mexico would threaten U.S. institutions and the character of the country. "We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race-the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake."

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, by diplomat Nicholas Trist and Mexican plenipotentiary representatives Luis G. Cuevas, Bernardo Couto, and Miguel Atristain, ended the war. The treaty gave the U.S. undisputed control of Texas, established the U.S.-Mexican border along the Rio Grande, and ceded to the United States the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. In return, Mexico received $ 15 million ($470 million today) - less than half the amount the U.S. had attempted to offer Mexico for the land before the opening of hostilities - and the U.S. agreed to assume $3.25 million ($102 million today) in debts that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens. The area of domain acquired was given by the Federal Interagency Committee as 338,680,960 acres. The cost was $16,295,149 or approximately 5 cents per acre. The area amounted to one-third of Mexico's original territory from its 1821 independence.

The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 38 to 14 on March 10 and by Mexico through a legislative vote of 51-34 and a Senate vote of 33-4, on May 19. News that New Mexico's legislative assembly had passed an act for the organization of a U.S. territorial government helped ease Mexican concern about abandoning the people of New Mexico. The acquisition was a source of controversy, especially among U.S. politicians who had opposed the war from the start. A leading anti-war U.S. newspaper, the Whig National Intelligencer, sardonically concluded that "We take nothing by conquest ... Thank God."

The acquired lands west of the Rio Grande are traditionally called the Mexican Cession in the U.S., as opposed to the Texas Annexation two years earlier, though the division of New Mexico down the middle at the Rio Grande never had any basis either in control or Mexican boundaries. Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas before the war and did not cede its claim to territory north of the Rio Grande or Gila River until this treaty.

Before ratifying the treaty, the U.S. Senate made two modifications: changing the wording of Article IX (which guaranteed Mexicans living in the purchased territories the right to become U.S. citizens) and striking out Article X (which conceded the legitimacy of land grants made by the Mexican government). On May 26, 1848, when the two countries exchanged ratifications of the treaty, they further agreed to a three-article protocol (known as the Protocol of Querétaro) to explain the amendments. The first article claimed that the original Article IX of the treaty, although replaced by Article III of the Treaty of Louisiana, would still confer the rights delineated in Article IX. The second article confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law. The protocol was signed in the city of Querétaro by A. H. Sevier, Nathan Clifford, and Luis de la Rosa.

Article XI offered a potential benefit to Mexico, in that the U.S. pledged to suppress the Comanche and Apache raids that had ravaged the region and pay restitution to the victims of raids it could not prevent. However, the Native raids did not cease for several decades after the treaty, although a cholera epidemic in 1849 greatly reduced the numbers of the Comanche. Robert Letcher, U.S. Minister to Mexico in 1850, was certain "that miserable 11th article" would lead to the financial ruin of the U.S. if it could not be released from its obligations. The U.S. was released from all obligations of Article XI five years later by Article II of the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.

Before the secession of Texas, Mexico comprised almost 1,700,000 sq mi (4,400,000 km ²), but by 1849 it was just under 800,000 square miles (2,100,000 km ²). Another 30,000 square miles (78,000 km ²) were sold to the U.S. in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, so the total reduction of Mexican territory was more than 55%, or 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km ²). Although the annexed territory was about the size of Western Europe, it was sparsely populated. The land contained about 14,000 non-indigenous people in Alta California and about 60,000 in Nuevo México, as well as large Native nations, such as the Papago, Pima, Puebloan, Navajo, Apache and many others. Although some native people relocated farther south in Mexico, the great majority remained in the U.S. territory.

The U.S. settlers surging into the newly conquered Southwest replaced Mexican law (a civil law system based on the law of Spain), which, in the Law of April 6, 1830, forbade any further immigration. However, they recognized the value of a few aspects of Mexican law and carried them over into their new legal systems. For example, most of the Southwestern states adopted community property marital property systems, as well as water law.

Mexicans and Natives in the annexed territories faced a loss of civil and political rights. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised U.S. citizenship to all former Mexican citizens living in the territories, however, the U.S. government did not grant full citizenship to Native Americans in the Southwest until the 1930s, even though they were Mexican citizens. The California Constitution of 1849 gave voting rights only to white male citizens (Article II), and the number of senators was proportioned only "according to the number of white inhabitants" (Article IV).

In much of the United States, victory and the acquisition of new land brought a surge of patriotism. Victory seemed to fulfill Democrats' belief in their country's Manifest Destiny. Although the Whigs had opposed the war, they made Zachary Taylor their presidential candidate in the election of 1848, praising his military performance while muting their criticism of the war.

Has the Mexican War terminated yet, and how? Are we beaten? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley [Massachusetts]? If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose [our teacher] Miss [Mary] Lyon [founder of Mount Holyoke College] would furnish us all with daggers and order us to fight for our lives ...

A month before the end of the war, Polk was criticized in a United States House of Representatives amendment to a bill praising Taylor for "a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States." This criticism, in which Congressman Abraham Lincoln played an important role with his Spot Resolutions, followed congressional scrutiny of the war's beginnings, including factual challenges to claims made by President Polk. The vote followed party lines, with all Whigs supporting the amendment. Lincoln's attack won lukewarm support from fellow Whigs in Illinois but was harshly counter-attacked by Democrats, who rallied pro-war sentiments in Illinois; Lincoln's Spot Resolutions haunted his future campaigns in the heavily Democratic state of Illinois and were cited by his rivals well into his presidency.

While Whig Ralph Waldo Emerson rejected war "as a means of achieving America's destiny," toward the end of the war he wrote: "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." He later accepted that "most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means." Civil War historian James M. McPherson dedicates an entire chapter of his Pulitzer winning Civil War history to the Mexican-American war, entitled "Mexico Will Poison Us". McPherson argues that the Mexican-American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the Civil War.

Following the signing of the 1848 treaty, Polk sought to send troops to Yucatan, where there was a civil war between secessionists and those supporting the Mexican government. The U.S. Congress refused his request. The Mexican War was supposed to be short and nearly bloodless. It was neither. Congress did not support more foreign conflict.

Many of the military leaders on both sides of the American Civil War of 1861-1865 had trained at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and had fought as junior officers in Mexico. This list includes military men fighting for the Union: Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, William T. Sherman, George Meade, and Ambrose Burnside. Military men who joined the Southern secessionists of the Confederacy included Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, Sterling Price, and the future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Both sides had leaders with significant experience in active combat, strategy, and tactics.

For Grant, who went on to lead Union forces in the Civil War and later was elected president, "it also tutored him in the manifold ways wars are shot through with political calculations." Grant had served in Mexico under General Zachary Taylor and was appointed acting assistant quartermaster for Taylor's army, a post he tried to decline since it took him away from the battlefield. However, "The appointment was actually a godsend for Grant, turning him into a complete soldier, adept at every facet of army life, especially logistics... This provided invaluable training for the Civil War when Grant would need to sustain gigantic armies in the field, distant from northern supply depots." Grant saw considerable combat and demonstrated his coolness under fire. In the Battle of Chapultepec, he and his men hoisted a howitzer into a church belfry that had a commanding view of the San Cosme gate. The action brought him the honorary rank of brevet captain, for "gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chapultepec."

Grant later recalled in his , published in 1885, that "Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation [of Texas] was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory." Grant also expressed the view that the war against Mexico had brought punishment on the United States in the form of the American Civil War. "The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."

Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces through the end of the Civil War, began building his reputation as a military officer in America's war against Mexico. At the start of the Mexican-American War, Captain Lee invaded Mexico with General Wool's engineering department from the North. By early 1847, he helped take the Mexican cities of Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec. Lee was wounded in Chapultepec. General Scott described Robert E. Lee as "gallant and indefatigable", saying that Lee had displayed the "greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual in [his] knowledge during the campaign". Grant gained insight into Robert E. Lee, as his memoir states, "I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this."

In 1861, General Scott advised Abraham Lincoln to ask Lee to command U.S. forces. Lee declined and later recounted "I declined the offer he made me to take command of the army that was brought into the field, stating candidly and as courteously as I could that though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in the invasion of the southern states."

Despite initial objections from the Whigs and from abolitionists, the Mexican war nevertheless united the U.S. in a common cause and was fought almost entirely by volunteers. The United States Army swelled from just over 6,000 to more than 115,000. The majority of 12-month volunteers in Scott's army decided that a year's fighting was enough and returned to the U.S.

Anti-slavery elements fought for the exclusion of slavery from any territory absorbed by the U.S. In 1847, the House of Representatives passed the Wilmot Proviso, stipulating that none of the territory acquired should be open to slavery. If successful, the Wilmot Proviso would have effectively cancelled out the 1820 Missouri Compromise, since it would have prohibited slavery in an area below the parallel 36°30′ north. The Senate avoided the issue, and a late attempt to add it to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was defeated because Southern Senators had the votes to prevent its addition. The House of Representatives is apportioned by population, and the North's was growing, allowing it to win the majority of the House in the 1846 elections; but the Senate representation is two per state and Southerners had enough votes to block the addition.

The war proved a decisive event for the U.S., marking a significant turning point for the nation as a growing military power. It is also a milestone in the U.S. narrative of Manifest Destiny. The war did not resolve the issue of slavery in the U.S. but rather in many ways inflamed it, as potential westward expansion of the institution became an increasingly central and heated theme in national debates preceding the American Civil War. By extending the territory of the United States to the Pacific Ocean, the end of the Mexican-American War marked a new step in the huge migrations of Americans to the West, which culminated in transcontinental railroads and the Indian wars later in the same century.

Following the Civil War, veterans of the Mexican war began to organize themselves as veterans regardless of rank and lobbied for their service. Initially they sought to create a soldiers' home for aged and ailing veterans, but then began pushing for pensions in 1874. There was resistance in Congress since veterans had received warrants for up to 160 acres of land for their service; pensions would have put a fiscal strain on the government. The politics were complicated since so many veterans of the Mexican war fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Republican Congressmen accused them of attempting to give federal aid to former Confederates. This led to a thirteen-year Congressional debate over the loyalty of the veterans and their worthiness to receive federal assistance in their declining years.

At the beginning of the war, U.S. troops under the command of Zachary Taylor adhered to the rules of war for the most part, under the watchful eye of Taylor, and almost exclusively engaged with enemy soldiers. This gained them some popularity with Mexican civilians, who held the occupying Americans in a degree of high regard compared to the Mexican Army who left their wounded to be captured by the enemy as they retreated from the area. In June 1846, the situation changed when American reinforcements entered the area and began raiding local farms. Many soldiers on garrison duty began committing crimes against civilians, such as robbery, rape and murder in order to alleviate their boredom. This wave of wanton crime resulted in American soldiers murdering at least 20 civilians during the first month of occupation. Taylor initially showed little concern with the crimes the soldiers were committing and failed to discipline the soldiers responsible for them or devise ways to prevent crimes. This led to public opinion turning against the U.S. troops, and resulted in many Mexicans taking up arms and forming guerrilla bands which attacked patrols of U.S soldiers. The attacks continued to get more prevalent, especially after the Battle of Monterrey.

The most infamous incident occurred on October 9, 1847 after Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker and 12 others were killed in a skirmish, brigadier general Joseph Lane ordered his men to avenge the dead Texas Rangers by sacking the town of Huamantla. The soldiers quickly became drunk after raiding a liquor store and began targeting the townspeople, raping and killing dozens of Mexican civilians while indiscriminately burning their homes. However, these reports of an American rampage were overshadowed by the news of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna's resignation after the Huamantla attack, leading to no repercussions against Lane or any of the soldiers involved in the atrocities.

Throughout the course of the war, a number of U.S. troops who had become disillusioned with the war and defected to the Mexican Army and joined the Saint Patrick's Battalion led by John Riley to fight for the Mexicans against the U.S. forces. The great majority of those made up the Saint Patrick's Battalion were recent immigrants who had arrived at northeastern U.S. from Ireland. Many defected due to mistreatment by nativist soldiers and senior officers, brutal military discipline, or because they were not allowed to practice their Catholic religion. Thousands of other U.S. soldiers simply deserted.

For Mexico, the war had remained a painful historical event for the country, losing territory and highlighting the domestic political conflicts that were to continue for another 20 years. The Reform War between liberals and conservatives in 1857 was followed by the Second French Intervention, which set up the Second Mexican Empire. The war caused Mexico to enter "a period of self-examination ... as its leaders sought to identify and address the reasons that had led to such a debacle." In the immediate aftermath of the war, a group of Mexican writers including Ignacio Ramírez, Guillermo Prieto, José María Iglesias, and Francisco Urquidi compiled a self-serving assessment of the reasons for the war and Mexico's defeat, edited by Mexican army officer Ramón Alcaraz. Denying that Mexican claims to Texas had anything to do with the war, they instead wrote that for "the true origin of the war, it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it." The work was noticed and translated to English by Colonel Albert Ramsey, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, and published in the United States in 1850 as a curiosity.

Despite his being denounced and held to account for Mexico's loss in the war, Santa Anna took to power for one last term as president. After he sold the Mesilla Valley in 1853 to the U.S., (the Gadsden Purchase) that allowed construction of a transcontinental railway on a better route, he was ousted and went into a lengthy exile. In exile he drafted his version of events, which were not published until much later.

Once the French were expelled in 1867 and the liberal republic re-established, Mexico began reckoning with the legacy of the war. The story of the Niños Héroes became the narrative that helped Mexicans to come to terms with the war. Boy cadets sacrificing themselves for the patria as martyrs in the Battle of Chapultepec was inspiring, but their sacrifice was not commemorated until 1881, when surviving cadets formed an organization to support the Military Academy of Mexico. One of the cadets taken prisoner designed the monument, a small cenotaph was erected at the base of Chapultepec hill on which the castle is built.

Annual commemorations at the cenotaph were attended by General Porfirio Díaz, who saw the opportunity to build his relationship with the Federal Army. Even during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the commemoration was continued and attended by contemporary presidents. After the end of the military phase, the Mexican government renewed the narrative of the boy heroes as the embodiment of sacrifice for the patria. Plans were drawn up for a much larger commemoration of their sacrifice, which was built at the entrance to Mexico City's Chapultepec Park. The Monument to the Heroic Cadets was inaugurated in 1952. By then, the relations between the U.S. and Mexico had improved so much that they had been allies in World War II and their postwar economies became increasingly intertwined. Some war trophies taken by the U.S., such as Mexican battle flags, were returned to Mexico with considerable ceremony, but captured U.S. flags remain in Mexico.

In 1981, the Mexican government established the Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones (National Museum of Interventions) in a former convent that was the site of the Battle of Churubusco. It chronicles the attempts by the Spanish to reconquer Mexico after its independence as well as the French interventions. The museum has an exhibition on the Intervención norteamericana de 1846-1848, which chronicles the Anglo-American settlement of Texas and their rebellion after characterizing themselves as victims of Mexican oppression. It goes on to blame the war on Polk and Santa Anna. "The [museum's] interpretation concedes U.S. military superiority in arms and commanders while disparaging General Santa Anna's costly mistakes and retreat from the capital city."

In the U.S. the war was almost forgotten after the cataclysm of the Civil War. However, one of the first monuments was erected on the State House grounds in South Carolina in 1858, celebrating the Palmetto Regiment. As veterans of the Civil War saw the scale of commemorations of that war, Mexican war veterans sought remembrance for their service. In 1885, a tableau of the U.S. Army's entry into Mexico City was painted in the U.S. Capitol Building by Filippo Constaggini. The Marine Corps Hymn, which includes the phrase "From the Halls of Montezuma" is an acknowledgment of the war, but there are no major monuments or memorials.

1. ^ White, Ronald Cedric (2017). American Ulysses: a life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House trade paperback ed.). New York: Random House. p. 96. ISBN 9780812981254. OCLC 988947112. The Mexican War of 1846-1848, largely forgotten today, was the second costliest war in American history in terms of the percentage of soldiers who died. Of the 78, 718 American soldiers who served, 13,283 died, constituting a casualty rate of 16.87 percent. By comparison, the casualty rate was 2.5 percent in World War I and World War II, 0.1 percent in Korea and Vietnam, and 21 percent for the Civil War. Of the casualties, 11,562 died of illness, disease, and accidents.

2. ^ Landis, Michael Todd (October 2, 2014). Northern Men with Southern Loyalties. Cornell University Press. doi:10.7591/cornell/9780801453267.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-8014-5326-7.

3. Stenberg, Richard R. (1935). "The Failure of Polk's Mexican War Intrigue of 1845". Pacific Historical Review. 4 (1): 39-68. doi:10.2307/3633243. JSTOR 3633243.

4. Alcaraz, Ramón; et al., eds. (1850). The Other Side: or Notes for the History of the War between Mexico and the United States. Translated by Albert C. Ramsey. New York: John Wiley. pp. 1-2. OCLC 1540860.

5. ^ Ralph A. Smith (1963). "Indians in American-Mexican Relations before the War of 1846". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 43 (1): 34-64. doi:10.2307/2510435. ISSN 0018-2168. JSTOR 2510435. Indian raids multiplied Mexico's problems, in the generation before her war with the United States, to a degree not generally realized today. They upset her agricultural, commercial, mineral, and ranch life over hundreds of thousands of square miles. Consequently, the country's capacity for defense declined at a time when centralism, clericalism, militarism, and American imperialism were debilitating the nation. The chief offending mountain tribes were Apache, Navajo, and Ute; and the most troublesome plains Natives were Comanche and Kiowa.

6. ^ "The Borderlands on the Eve of War" Archived August 31, 2017, at the Wayback Machine. The U.S.-Mexican War. PBS.

7. ^ Engelson, Lester G. (1939). "Proposals for the Colonization of California by England: In Connection with the Mexican Debt to British Bondholders 1837-1846". California Historical Society Quarterly. 18 (2): 136-48. doi:10.2307/25139106. ISSN 0008-1175. JSTOR 25139106.

8. ^ Howard Zinn (1995) [1980]. A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (1st Perennial ed.). New York: Harper Perennial. p. 675. ISBN 0-06-092643-0.

9. See ^ "Republic of Texas". June 15, 2010. Archived from the original on April 29, 2009.

10. ^ Chartrand, Rene (March 25, 2004). René Chartrand, Santa Anna's Mexican Army 1821-48, Illustrated by Bill Younghusband, Osprey Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1-84176-667-4, ISBN 978-1-84176-667-6. ISBN 9781841766676.

11. ^ Lacroix, Patrick (2020). "Canadian-Born Soldiers in the Mexican-American War (1846-48): An Opportunity for Migration Studies". International Journal of Canadian Studies. 57: 27-46. doi:10.3138/ijcs.57.x.27. S2CID 225452642.

12. ^ Bauer, K. Jack (Karl Jack), 1926- (1993) [1974]. The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Bison books ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-6107-1. OCLC 25746154.

13. ^ Smith, Justin Harvey (1919). "The Preliminaries of the Conflict". The War with Mexico. Vol. 1. New York: Macmillan. p. 150. ISBN 9781508654759. Here lay a casus belli amply endorsed by international law, the practice of civilized powers, and the general opinion of the world. It was a ground, too, that Polk himself, as we have seen, felt entirely satisfied to stand upon [...].

14. ^ "Message of President Polk, May 11, 1846". Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.

15. ^ Ángel Miranda Basurto (2002) [1987]. La Evolución de México [The Evolution of Mexico] (in Spanish) (6th ed.). Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa. p. 358. ISBN 970-07-3678-4.

16. See O'Sullivan's 1845 article ^ "Annexation" Archived November 25, 2005, at the Wayback Machine, United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

17. ^ Reilly, Tom (June 1, 1977). "Newspaper Suppression During the Mexican War, 1846-48". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 54 (2): 262-349. doi:10.1177/107769907705400205. S2CID 143779590. Archived from the original on December 15, 2018.

18. Editorial, ^ Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1846, quoted in Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2010, p. 65.

19. ^ Streetby, Shellby (2001). "American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War". American Literary History. 13:1: 2.

20. Garrard, Lewis H. (1850). ^ Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail; or Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a Look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Camp-fire Archived June 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, pp. 214-215; reprint, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1955.

21. Diseño Web y Desarrollo de Aplicaciones por Webtopia, Retrieved May 8, 2014.

22. ^ Miller, Robert Ryal (1989). Shamrock and Sword, The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the US-Mexican War. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 188-192. ISBN 978-0-8061-2964-8.

23. ^ Zinn, Howard (2003). "Chapter 8: We take nothing by conquest, Thank God". A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 169.

24. ^ Franzius, Andrea. "California Gold - Migrating to California: Overland, around the Horn and via Panama". Archived from the original on June 22, 2012.

25. Griswold el Castillo, Richard ^ War's End: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Archived February 13, 2010, at the Wayback Machine PBS, 2006.

26. ^ Mexican-American War description from the Republican Campaign Textbook Archived May 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine.

27. ^ Sneiderman, Barney (2006). Warriors Seven: Seven American Commanders, Seven Wars, and the Irony of Battle. New York: Savas Beatie. pp. 118. ISBN 978-1932714289.

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Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico (2007) 527pp; the major scholarly study excerpt and text search

Graebner, Norman A. Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion. (1955).

Graebner, Norman A. (1978). "Lessons of the Mexican War". Pacific Historical Review. 47 (3): 325-42. doi:10.2307/3637470. ISSN 1533-8584. JSTOR 3637470.

Graebner, Norman A. (1980). "The Mexican War: A Study in Causation". Pacific Historical Review. 49 (3): 405-26. doi:10.2307/3638563. ISSN 1533-8584. JSTOR 3638563.

Greenberg, Amy. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico. New York: Knopf 2012.

Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (2007), survey

Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power, (1997), textbook.

Pinheiro, John C. Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (2007).

Pletcher David M. The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. University of Missouri Press, 1973.

Price, Glenn W. Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue. University of Texas Press, 1967.

Reeves, Jesse S. (1905). "The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo". The American Historical Review. 10 (2): 309-24. doi:10.2307/1834723. hdl:10217/189496. ISSN 1937-5239. JSTOR 1834723.

Reilly, Tom. War with Mexico! America's Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press 2010.

Rives, George Lockhart (1913). The United States and Mexico, 1821-1848: a history of the relations between the two countries from the independence of Mexico to the close of the war with the United States. Vol. 2. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

Ruiz, Ramon Eduardo. Triumph and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People, Norton 1992, textbook

Santoni, Pedro. Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845-1848. Fort Worth: Texas Christian Press 1996.

Schroeder John H. Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846-1848. University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.

Sellers Charles G. James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846 (1966), the standard biography vol 1 and 2 are online at ACLS e-books

Smith, Justin Harvey. The War with Mexico. 2 vol (1919). Pulitzer Prize winner. full text online.

Stephenson, Nathaniel Wright. Texas and the Mexican War: A Chronicle of Winning the Southwest. Yale University Press (1921).

Weinberg Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935.

Yanez, Agustin. Santa Anna: Espectro de una sociedad (1996).

Benjamin, Thomas. "Recent Historiography of the Origins of the Mexican War," New Mexico Historical Review, Summer 1979, Vol. 54 Issue 3, pp 169-181

Connors, Thomas G. and Raúl Isaí Muñoz. "Looking for the North American Invasion in Mexico City." American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 2, April 2020, pp. 498-516.

Faulk, Odie B., and Stout, Joseph A., Jr., eds. The Mexican War: Changing Interpretations (1974)

Johannsen, Robert. To the Halls of Montezuma: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press 1985.

Pinheiro, John C. Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War. New York: Oxford University Press 2014.

Rodriguez, Jaime Javier. The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (University of Texas Press; 2010) 306 pages. Covers works by Anglo, Mexican, and Mexican-American writers.

Van Wagenen, Michael. Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.-Mexican War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2012.

Vázquez, Josefina Zoraida. "La Historiografia Sobre la Guerra entre Mexico y los Estados Unidos," ["The historiography of the war between Mexico and the United States"] Histórica (02528894), 1999, Vol. 23 Issue 2, pp 475-485

Calhoun, John C. The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Vol. 23: 1846, ed. by Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley Bright Cook. (1996). 598 pp

Calhoun, John C. The Papers of John C. Calhoun. Vol. 24: December 7, 1846 - December 5, 1847 ed. by Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley Bright Cook, (1998). 727 pp.

Conway, Christopher, ed. The U.S.-Mexican War: A Binational Reader (2010)

Coulter, Richard. Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sargeant Thomas Barclay, ed. Allan Peskin. Kent: Kent State University Press 1991.

Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh (1990). Ferrell, Robert H. (ed.). Monterrey Is Ours!: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845-1847. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0813117034. LCCN 89029351.

Grant, Ulysses S. (1885). Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co.

Hill, Daniel Harvey. A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery USA. NCC Hughes and TD Johnson, eds. Kent OH: Kent State University Press 2003.

Kendall, George Wilkins.Dispatches from the Mexican War. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1999.

Laidley, Theodore. Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds: The Mexican War Letter of Lieutenant Theodore Laidley. Denton: University of North Texas 1997.

McAfee, Ward and J. Cordell Robinson, eds. Origins of the Mexican War: A Documentary Source Book. 2 vols. 1982.

McClellan, George. The Mexican War Diary and Correspondence of George B. McClellan. ed. Thomas Cutrer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2009.

Polk, James, K. (2017) [1910]. Quaiff, Milo Milton (ed.). The Diary of James K. Polk During his Presidency, 1845 to 1849. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. ISBN 978-1-5033-7428-7.

Robinson, Cecil, The View From Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican War, University of Arizona Press (Tucson, 1989).

Smith, Franklin (1991). Joseph E. Chance (ed.). The Mexican War Journal of Captain Franklin Smith. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, ed. (1968). Chronicles of the Gringos: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846-1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants. Albuquerque, New Mexico: The University of New Mexico Press.

Tennery, Thomas. The Mexican War Diary of Thomas D. Tennery. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1970

Webster, Daniel (1984). Charles M. Wiltse (ed.). The Papers of Daniel Webster, Correspondence. Vol. 6. Hanover, New Hampshire: The University Press of New England.

Zeh, Frederick. An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican American War. College Station: Texas A&M Press 1995.

William Hugh Robarts, "Mexican War veterans: a complete roster of the regular and volunteer troops in the war between the United States and Mexico, from 1846 to 1848; the volunteers are arranged by states, alphabetically", BRENTANO'S (A. S. WITHERBEE & CO, Proprietors); WASHINGTON, D. C., 1887.

PBS site of US-Mexican war program Archived November 2, 2019, at the Wayback Machine

Battle of Monterrey Web Site - Complete Info on the battle

Manifest Destiny and the U.S.-Mexican War: Then and Now

Smithsonian teaching aids for "Establishing Borders: The Expansion of the United States, 1846-48"

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Mexican-American War

Invisible Men: Blacks and the U.S. Army in the Mexican War by Robert E. May

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Google Map of The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848

John H. Hewitt wrote the song "The Fall of Mexico" in 1847

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Mexican-American War Clockwise from top: Battle of Resaca de la Palma, U.S. victory at Churubusco outside of Mexico City, Marines storming Chapultepec castle under a large U.S.

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Resource

ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Native Americans resisted the efforts of the Europeans to gain more land and control during the colonial period, but they struggled to do so against a sea of problems, including new diseases, the slave trade, and an ever-growing European population.

Subjects

Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, U.S. History

Image

Diplomacy between Cheyenne and Settlers

Whether through diplomacy, war, or even alliances, Native American efforts to resist European encroachment further into their lands were often unsuccessful in the colonial era.

Photograph of woodcut by North Wind Picture Archives

During the colonial period, Native Americans had a complicated relationship with European settlers. They resisted the efforts of the Europeans to gain more of their land and control through both warfare and diplomacy. But problems arose for the Native Americans, which held them back from their goal, including new diseases, the slave trade, and the ever-growing European population in North America.

In the 17th century, as European nations scrambled to claim the already occupied land in the "New World," some leaders formed alliances with Native American nations to fight foreign powers. Some famous alliances were formed during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. The English allied with the Iroquois Confederacy, while the Algonquian-speaking tribes joined forces with the French and the Spanish. The English won the war, and claimed all of the land east of the Mississippi River. The English-allied Native Americans were given part of that land, which they hoped would end European expansion-but unfortunately only delayed it. Europeans continued to enter the country following the French and Indian War, and they continued their aggression against Native Americans. Another consequence of allying with Europeans was that Native Americans were often fighting neighboring tribes. This caused rifts that kept some Native American tribes from working together to stop European takeover.

Native Americans were also vulnerable during the colonial era because they had never been exposed to European diseases, like smallpox, so they didn't have any immunity to the disease, as some Europeans did. European settlers brought these new diseases with them when they settled, and the illnesses decimated the Native Americans-by some estimates killing as much as 90 percent of their population. Though many epidemics happened prior to the colonial era in the 1500s, several large epidemics occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries among various Native American populations. With the population sick and decreasing, it became more and more difficult to mount an opposition to European expansion.

Another aspect of the colonial era that made the Native Americans vulnerable was the slave trade. As a result of the wars between the European nations, Native Americans allied with the losing side were often indentured or enslaved. There were even Native Americans shipped out of colonies like South Carolina into slavery in other places, like Canada.

These problems that arose for the Native Americans would only get worse in the 19th century, leading to greater confinement and the extermination of native people. Unfortunately, the colonial era was neither the start nor the end of the long, dark history of treatment of Native Americans by Europeans and their decedent's throughout in the United States.

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National Geographic Society

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Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

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Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society

Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

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Native Americans resisted the efforts of the Europeans to gain more land and control during the colonial period, but they struggled to do so against a sea of problems, including new diseases, the slave trade, and an ever-growing European population.

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Native American Foragers and the History of National Parks

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Native American Foragers and the History of National Parks

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ROASTING RUDE FOLKS WITH FACTS #LearnOnTikTok #TikTokPartner

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ROASTING RUDE FOLKS WITH FACTS #LearnOnTikTok #TikTokPartner
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Chinese Immigration and the Chinese in the United States

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Introduction From 1882 to 1943 the United States Government severely curtailed immigration from China to the United States. This Federal policy resulted from concern over the large numbers of Chinese who had come to the United States in response to the need for inexpensive labor, especially for construction of the transcontinental railroad.

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European immigration to America began with British settlers in the 17th century. Later generations of these colonists would become the first American citizens following the American Revolution. From there on, any Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to America were considered immigrants, rather than native-born Americans.

European Immigration to America: History

In American history, there were two waves of European immigration. Immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, part of the first wave of immigration, came in hoards during the 19th century. As the 19th century carried on into the twentieth century, a second wave of immigrants, known as the new immigrants , began to flood into American cities.

In contrast to the old immigrants , these new immigrants were from Southern and Eastern Europe. They didn't speak English and their customs were less familiar. Additionally, many of them were Catholic and Jewish, at odds with the primarily Protestant native-born population. As a result of this and the perception that they were stealing jobs, these immigrants faced particular . xenophobia

a fear and dislike of immigrants

European Immigration to America: Map

This map shows the nationality of European immigrants coming to America during the Gilded Age:

European Immigration to America: The Numbers

Below, we can get a better idea of the numbers:

European Immigration to America: Reasons

There were two main reasons for the second wave of European immigration to America: the promise of economic opportunity and religious persecution. Generally, the reason went hand-in-hand with where in Europe the immigrants were coming from. Immigrants from Southern Europe, such as Italy and Greece, often fled economic turmoil in their own countries. Many of the immigrants from Eastern Europe, such as Russia and Poland, were Jewish and seeking religious freedom.

European Immigration to America: The Journey to America

The advent of the railroad and the creation of better ships made immigration a more realistic feat for the average European. Immigrants from the center of Europe could simply take a train ride to a port city, where they could purchase a ticket for much less money than in the past.

In the padrone system, financiers, called padrones, offered Europeans passage to America through contract labor agreements. The padrones would have a job ready for the immigrants, and in exchange, the immigrants would give a portion of their wages to the padrones. This system was common among Greeks and Italians and often exploitative.

Upon their arrival, immigrants went to processing centers, where federal agents detained them before granting them access to America. Many immigrants went through the infamous Ellis Island in New York. Federal agents subjected them to probing question before they had to undergo dehumanizing doctor's examinations. Agents could turn immigrants away for a host of reasons, including suspected criminal activity or disease.

European Immigration to America: Life in America

America was not the utopia that many European immigrants imagined. The streets were not paved with gold, but they filled with garbage and human waste. Many immigrants settled in cities, contributing to overpopulation and overcrowded conditions. Oftentimes, immigrant families found themselves living in tenement houses in the slums.

Ethnic neighborhoods developed where immigrants could preserve and practice their customs, as well as join ethnic organizations, such as mutual benefit associations . These associations would collect a membership fee so that if a member or family fell on hard times, there would be funding to support them.

Chinatown and Little Italy in New York City are examples of ethnic neighborhoods.

When it came to employment, European immigrants took the jobs that native-born Americans did not wish to take, ranging from work in the coal mines to steel mills. They worked long hours for little pay, and often under dangerous conditions. A memoir of a Russian-Jewish immigrant reads:

'Father, does everybody in America live like this? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep? And the next day again work, eat, and sleep? Will I have to do that too? Always?'

Father looked thoughtful and ate two or three mouthfuls before he answered. 'No,' he said smiling. 'You will get married.'"

- Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 1918 ¹

European Immigration to America: Anti-Immigration Policies

In 1907, immigration hit an all-time high with 1.3 million immigrants entering the country. But, as we discussed earlier, not all Americans welcomed them with open arms. During World War I, the flow of immigration from Europe declined, and the federal government wanted to ensure that immigration rates remained low after the war was over. This prompted an era of anti-immigration policies.

The Immigration Act of 1917 instituted literacy tests for all immigrants over the age of 16, purposely targeting the low literacy rates in Southern and Eastern Europe. The Immigration Act of 1924 took it a step further with a quota that reduced the number of immigrants allowed to 2% of the given nationality's population in America.

If a certain nationality had 100 individuals living in America, the federal government's quota would be two immigrants.

Similar to the Immigration Act of 1917, this Immigration Act of 1924 specifically targeted the so-called new immigrants. The government used data from the 1890 census rather than the more recent 1910 census, meaning immigrants from Northern and Western Europe (the more favorable immigrants) had higher quotas.

European Immigration to America - Key Takeaways

There were two waves of European immigration to America. The first wave was in the 19th century and included immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. They were known as the old immigrants.

The second wave was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These new immigrants were from Southern and Eastern Europe. They faced particular xenophobia because they did not speak English and had fewer familiar customs.

Generally, these immigrants came to pursue economic opportunity or to escape religious persecution.

Both the journey to America and life in America were difficult for immigrants. They found solace in ethnic neighborhoods.

Immigration rates declined during World War I and the government instituted anti-immigration policies such as the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

References

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European immigration to America began with British settlers in the 17th century. Later generations of these colonists would become the first American citizens following the American Revolution. From there on, any Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to America were considered immigrants, rather than native-born Americans. In American history, there were two waves of European immigration.

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How the Chicano Movement Championed Mexican-American Identity and Fought for Change | HISTORY

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Chicano activists took on a name that had long been a racial slur—and wore it with pride.

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We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
--Preamble to the United States Constitution

The Constitution of the United States

All four pages of the document are on permanent display at the National Archives.

The Constitution acted like a colossal merger, uniting a group of states with different interests, laws, and cultures. Under America's first national government, the Articles of Confederation, the states acted together only for specific purposes. The Constitution united its citizens as members of a whole, vesting the power of the union in the people. Without it, the American Experiment might have ended as quickly as it had begun.

Back to Main Page What Does it Say?

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Español We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

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Voting largely left out nonwhite men and women, regardless of color, for much of American history. This voter registration drive at the Black Expo in Chicago, Illinois, took place in 1973, just eight years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

Photograph from John White/U.S. National Archives/Alamy Images

Friday, July 24, 2020

The right to vote-and who may exercise it-has changed continuously over the course of United States' history. While states have traditionally determined requirements for voting, the federal government has taken several actions that have altered those requirements in an attempt to create more In the 2013 case equity and equality in the process. Today, in order to vote in federal elections, one must be a United States citizen, at least 18 years old by the date of the general election, and a resident of the state in which one votes. However, these requirements used to be more restrictive.

Voting After the American Revolution

Following the American Revolution, the new country transitioned from a period of being under British rule to developing its own government. After the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the country adopted the United States Constitution in 1787. Article 1 of the Constitution empowers state legislatures to oversee federal elections. Suffrage, or the right to vote, was granted exclusively to white, land-owning men. Since they were at such an early stage of the republic, the founders believed these men's economic ties to the country were valuable.

However, a growing number of men began to champion an expansion of suffrage during the early 1800s. Following a period that lacked political parties or choices for voters, the 1820s saw the return of a two-party political system, as well as a renewed interest in suffrage. White men continued to move West in search of available land, but many did not feel that ownership should be a requirement for voting. Many states removed that requirement, opening the door for complete white male suffrage.

Voting After the Civil War

While the country celebrated the expansion of voting rights for white men of all economic levels, the electorate still lacked diversity. Gender and race exclusions still restricted the ability of many citizens living within the United States to exercise the right to vote. Following the conclusion of the American Civil War in the 1860s, the Radical Republicans controlled Congress. These men were primarily white Northerners who wanted to restrict the political power of the South following its rebellion against the U.S. federal government. As a result of the 13th Amendment, a large number of African Americans living in the South were freed from slavery, in addition to the many living in the North. Radical Republicans saw this as an opportunity not only to help their own cause, but also to extend suffrage to African American men. In 1870, the 15 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The ratification of the 15 th Amendment, which affirmed the right of African American men to vote, followed that of the 14 th Amendment, which classified anyone born in the United States a citizen. The 14 th Amendment also granted "the equal protection of the laws" to all citizens. While this amendment became the basis for citizenship, along with the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 (this allowed for Native Americans to vote but did not enforce the right; it would take 40 more years until all U.S. states granted full suffrage to Native Americans), it would also be cited more than any other in litigation. The 14 th Amendment would also be at the center of the civil rights movement, which attempted to combat discrimination African Americans faced for nearly a century after its passage.

African Americans faced Supreme Court challenges ( Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) that condoned separation of the races, as well as challenges at the polls. Having to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test were just some examples of legalized state discrimination that African Americans faced in their attempts to exercise their right to vote. Many also faced threats of violence, lynching, and other scare tactics. It was not until the 1960s that the federal government more effectively protected their right to vote. After a series of speeches, sit-ins, and marches in Selma, Alabama, and other cities in the South, the 24 th Amendment-which abolished poll taxes-and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected the right to vote for African Americans and others. Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, the court struck down a section of the law that required states with a history of race-based voter discrimination to gain federal approval before changing their election rules.

The Fight for Women's Suffrage

Women were important supporters of the abolition movement in the mid-19 th century, as they saw parallels with their own inequality during the period. A women's rights movement developed around the 1840s under the leadership of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 they introduced the "Declaration of Sentiments," which included a revision to the Declaration of Independence, that "all men and women are created equal." While their attempts to achieve women's suffrage were unsuccessful at the time, they inspired future campaigners.

Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote in 1869, but it was not until 1920 that white women were granted the ability to vote nationwide. African American women continued to face obstacles to vote for many years following the 19th Amendment. The Progressive movement's reforms and women's work in industry during World War I helped drive support. The National American Woman Suffrage Association's constant protests, campaigning, and marches finally gained support from prominent politicians, such as President Woodrow Wilson, following the war. It was a catalyst that led more women to become involved in politics and government.

The ratification of the 26 th Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age to 18, extending suffrage to more young adults.

Credits

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

Author

National Geographic Society

Production Managers

Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society
Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

Program Specialists

Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society
Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

Producer

Clint Parks

Last Updated

July 24, 2020

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Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

Author

National Geographic Society

Production Managers

Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society
Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

Program Specialists

Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society
Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

Producer

Clint Parks

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Voting Rights Throughout United States History

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Image Voting largely left out nonwhite men and women, regardless of color, for much of American history. This voter registration drive at the Black Expo in Chicago, Illinois, took place in 1973, just eight years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed. Photograph from John White/U.S.

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Learn about the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.

The Constitution of the United States divides the federal government into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. This ensures that no individual or group will have too much power.

How each branch of government provides checks and balances

The ability of each branch to respond to the actions of the other branches is the system of checks and balances.

Each branch of government can change acts of the other branches:

The president can veto legislation created by Congress. He or she also nominates heads of federal agencies and high court appointees.

Congress confirms or rejects the president's nominees. It can also remove the president from office in exceptional circumstances.

The Justices of the Supreme Court, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, can overturn unconstitutional laws.

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Branches of the U.S. government | USAGov

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Learn about the 3 branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. Understand how each branch of U.S. government provides checks and balances.

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Baseball History, American History and You | Baseball Hall of Fame

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We play it as kids, we watch it and listen to it as adults, and we pass down our love of the Game through generations. Baseball is an American family tradition.

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America: perhaps the most eminent nation on planet earth and, to many, the greatest too. A surplus of famous symbols and images have come to signify what the United States stands for and what the country represents, ranging from the majestic (like the soaring Bald Eagle), to the proud (like the image of John Wayne striding across the Frontier). Yet, nothing screams USA quite like the sport of American football and the multi-million dollar league in which it's played: The National Football League (commonly referred to as The NFL).

An organisation with a rich and illustrious history, the NFL has evolved from humble origins to eventually morph into the towering enterprise and noteworthy American national treasure it is today. Here, we take a dive into the history books of American football to see exactly how the NFL came to fruition, what changes have happened along the way, and why it has become the quintessential symbol of American sport.

How Did The NFL Begin?

The NFL spans across pretty much the whole of America nowadays, and you'd be hard pressed to find a city that didn't have some sort of football team in operation - even if the side happened to play at an amateur level. However, this wasn't always the case. The National Football League was a non-entity until after the end of the First World War, although the sport itself had already bloomed into professional pastures as early as 1892.

As American football continued to become more popular and the game threatened to be overshadowed by matters of finance, a formal meeting was held with the aim of forming a league in which all the participating teams would adhere to the same rules. This meeting took place in Canton, Ohio with the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles all present. The outcome was a brand new organisation known as the "American Professional Football Conference", which became the "American Professional Football Association" after a second meeting that saw several additional clubs in attendance. Four more clubs would enter the league at various points throughout the first season as the new organisation slowly attempted to find its feet.

The Beginnings

The very first season of the NFL (which was of course still named the American Professional Football Conference back then) took place in 1920, with 13 teams in participation. These included:

Akron Pros

Buffalo All-Americans

Chicago Cardinals

Rock Island Independents

Dayton Triangles

Rochester Jeffersons

Canton Bulldogs

Detroit Heralds

Cleveland Tigers

Chicago Tigers

Hammond Pros

Columbus Panhandles

Muncie Flyers

As you can see, the monikers for each city team appeared to be a little more playful back in the 1920's, and very few of these sides still exist to this day.

Despite the formation of this official league, the rules and regulations were hardly set in stone. The $100 entry fee for joining the league was mandatory but there are no records of any of the teams actually ever paying it, nor was there an effective schedule in place where teams would play against one another on dates agreed by the organisational body. There was no Super Bowl game to determine the overall victor of the competition either, and it took the organisation four months to crown the Akron Pros as champions - which was decided by a vote. In a modern American football world where fixtures are meticulously plotted out and announced weeks before the season begins, this sort of carefree, laissez-faire style of match scheduling seems unthinkable, but this was the way it all went down when the NFL was in its infancy.

This first season proved to be a bumpy one. A momentous first game between American Professional Football Association sides took place on October 3rd, 1920 with the Dayton Triangles defeating the Columbus Panhandles 14-0. Lou Partlow owns the record of the very first touchdown ever scored. But as the season wore on, several teams dropped out of the running for the championship and two sides even disbanded - the Chicago Tigers and Detroit Heralds failing to find adequate funding to continue to participate in the league. There was promise to be found in these early days, but nobody at that time could have possibly envisaged how big the game was set to become in the following decades.

In 1922, the American football league would officially be renamed once again - although this time the moniker stuck. From the 1922 season forward, the organisation hosting American football would be the National Football League. Yet, despite the name change, the competition stumbled through the 1920's, constantly overshadowed by college football and drawing paltry crowds in comparison. During the course of the decade, over forty different sides joined the league and flopped and folded within months or years - demonstrating the lack of stability present in the competition. 1921 did, however, see the Green Bay Packers sign up to the NFL - a team that has grown to become the longest-living franchise (to retain its name and location) in the organisation.

What Changes Has The NFL Seen Throughout History?

It's safe to say the NFL has changed a bit since it first began. The first, and most blatant, difference of all is that the league today is essentially unrecognisable from the very first one that took place back in 1920. Out of the thirty-two teams who currently play in the NFL, only two of them were in force when the league first kicked off - and even these clubs are shadows of the sides they were back then. The Cardinals are still in operation - although now they play in Arizona (whereas back at the beginning of the NFL they played in Chicago). The Chicago Bears were also a founding member, but they actually played under the name Decatur Staleys for their first year in the American Professional Football Association before relocating from Georgia to Chicago for the 1921 season. They have been stationed in the Windy City ever since.

Listed below are some of the most notable moments to occur during the history of the NFL, each of them helping to illustrate how the competition has changed and developed since it first began way back in 1920.

1927 - The Strong Rise Above The Weak

In an attempt to salvage the competition from its reputation of accommodating fast-fading franchises, the organisation held a meeting and decided to officially expel any side within the league that was not financially stable or could not guarantee future financial growth. This slashed the competition from 22 teams to 12 - the bulk of the surviving sides being large cities stationed in the East of the US.

1936 - First College Draft

The official NFL draft is a big thing nowadays, but that wasn't always the case. The first draft of college football players didn't occur until 1936. A bit of trivia in this area is that the very first player ever selected in the draft - Jay Berwanger - actually never played in the NFL after being chosen. Instead, he took up a role in the plastics manufacturing industry.

1939 - First Televised Match

There weren't many television sets in America at the beginning of World War II, but the NFL nonetheless aired its very first match on network NBC on October 22nd, 1939, showing the Brooklyn Dodgers facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Dodgers won the game 23-14. Television broadcasts of NFL matches became more regular after the end of war, as the organisation continued to attract bigger audiences and more people in the country came to purchase their very own television sets.

1940's - War and Ethnic Diversity

WWII had a severe and detrimental impact on all sports in the United States, as many players were forced to leave the country to fight in the military service. It was not unknown for players to play for the team near which they were based in a military camp, and Pennsylvania even formed a new team that was an amalgamation of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - two sides that would ordinarily consider one another arch rivals.

1958 - The Greatest NFL Game Of All Time Takes Place

There have been some phenomenal games over the course of NFL history, but the vast majority of the American football aficionados repeatedly turn to December 28th, 1958 when the topic of "greatest ever game" arises. This was the first ever match to end up going into sudden death overtime. It featured the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, with the Colts eventually triumphing 23-17. It was a pivotal moment in the history of the NFL, attracting enormous attention and playing a considerable role in the sudden upsurge in popularity of the league.

1961 - NFL Corporate HQ Relocates To New York

As the NFL continued to grow in terms of popularity, the commissioning body also grew in terms of their hunger for success and ambition to expand the game further. In an attempt to strengthen the NFL's relationships with the kingpin television networks, the organisation decided a move to New York was necessary. The corporate headquarters was officially relocated, moving from Pennsylvania across to the Rockefeller Centre in New York City.

1963 - The Hall of Fame Opens

In 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame officially opened - an establishment which would welcome and honour anyone involved in the NFL who was considered to have made a positive impact on the competition and sport of American football overall since the game first began.

1967 - The First Super Bowl

January 15, 1967 saw the very first Super Bowl take place - the final in which the best two performing teams after the playoffs compete against one another in an attempt to take home the Vince Lombardi Trophy. This coveted prize is named after one of the most successful coaches in NFL history, best known for his time leading the Green Bay Packers during the 1960's and guiding them to five NFL championship victories in just seven years - one of the greatest achievements in the sport of American football.

1982 - The Very First Halftime Musical Show Takes Place

That halftime Super Bowl show that a lot of American citizens have come to love and look forward to didn't actually materialise until 1982 - where Diana Ross performed at Super Bowl XVI. This was another key moment in NFL history with the half time show becoming bigger, bolder and more spectacular with every passing year from then on.

1987 - The NFL Players Association Goes On Strike

The NFL faced one of its most serious crisis in its history in 1987 when the NFL Players Association ultimately decided to go on strike. This took place because the participating players in the league wanted a higher proportion of league revenues. This went on for the best part of a month, and crowds stayed away whilst clubs were forced to field amateur and youth players. However, the strike failed to hold and the NFL Players Association crumbled, forcing players to go back to the playing field without being awarded many of the new terms that a lot of them had demanded during the onset of the strike.

NFL Today

You don't have to be an American football fan to understand how big the NFL is today. Despite being predominantly played within the United States, the top league of American football is broadcast all over the globe and is one of the most lucrative and renowned sporting organisations on the planet. The average NFL team is now worth $2 BILLION, and games can attract six-figure attendances. The NFL has come on in leaps and bounds since it first began, and it's difficult to picture those rocky days in the twenties when you see modern-day teams on television being roared on to victory by crowds of 100,000. Hopefully, there is much more NFL history to be made over the course of the next century.

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America: perhaps the most eminent nation on planet earth and, to many, the greatest too. A surplus of famous symbols and images have come to signify what the United States stands for and what the country represents, ranging from the majestic (like the soaring Bald Eagle), to the proud (like the image of John Wayne striding across the Frontier).

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Race and sports have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination in sport, but these were largely descriptive. Two exceptions to this were C. L. R. James's critical reading of the role of cricket in shaping West Indian political identity in the anti colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and Harry Edwards's important account of the radicalization of the black athlete in the context of America's Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and black nationalist politics of the 1970s.

Outline

In the 1970s and 1980s sport sociologists began to investigate continuing racial discrimination in sport with a liberal focus on issues of equity and opportunity, normally using quantitative methods to measure the degree of meritocracy in sports. More recently, scholars have used cultural studies approaches to examine questions of representation and ideology in sport media texts, and ethnographic methods to understand racial identity construction in sport and its intersections with class, nation, gender, and sexuality.

Sport and Race as Social Phenomena

''Sport'' and ''race'' are sociologically problematic because, at first sight, both appear to be aspects of human life that are immediately knowable and products of a natural physicality that precedes socialization. ''Race,'' the division of humanity into biologically discrete groups based on phenotypical markers, is commonly believed to be the result of an inherent, fixed, and natural distinction between actually existing groups. But sociologists and biologists alike have demonstrated that the supposed ''natural'' division of humanity is unrelated to underlying genotypical distinctions. Instead, racial distinctions are based on arbitrarily chosen physical features, such as skin color and hair texture, that are used to demarcate people into groups. Thus, ''race'' is a complex system of representation learned through socialization, and then acted upon as if these distinctions were ''real.'' In short, ''race'' appears to be a biological fact of absolute physical difference when it is actually a socially constructed and culturally reproduced set of ideas and beliefs.

Similarly, ''sport'' appears to be a purely physical activity that is separate from the wider divisions and structures of society. Although we might immediately recognize the social conditions of education, cultural capital, and aesthetic discernment that frame the production and consumption of other cultural forms, sport is commonly seen as an activity that is ''simply'' physical and open to all regardless of class, gender, race, or sexuality. Barriers in sports, it is believed, exist only in connection with the physical abilities and motivation of individuals. This view of sport as ''free'' from structural constraints means that sport's role in maintaining and reproducing power relations is underestimated.

Sociologists of sport have sought to explain how the sports we choose to play, the ways that we play them, the meanings we give to and take from them, and the material and social rewards associated with participation and success are intimately related to the structure and organization of societies. Given this, it requires great sociological imagination to go beyond such everyday understandings to reveal how both race and sport, far from being universal, naturally occurring phenomena, are actually the result of temporally bound and historically specific human action. In short, the interrelationship between race and sport is a deeply sociological articulation with profound political consequences for how we generally understand racial difference and who has access to sport itself.

Racial Science and Empire

There is an interesting historical parallel between the emergence of the scientific foundation for ideas of racial difference and the formation of organized, codified, competitive sport. Racial science - the scientific belief in the inherent superiority of white Europeans - developed into a coherent set of ideas during the nineteenth century. In Britain this was the period when sports such as rugby football, cricket, and soccer were institutionalized, as emerging governing bodies formalized rules and assumed authority over how these sports should be played.

The nineteenth century was also the high point for European imperialism, when the idea of race emerged to justify conquest and exploitation. Countries such as Britain sought to maintain their power over their colonies in Africa, South and East Asia, and the Caribbean by a twin process of undermining and destroying local cultures while attempting to ''civilize'' native peoples by the imposition of British customs and ways of life. In this context of imperialist expansion, buttressed by notions of inherent white European supremacy, sport came to be seen as a way of educating and socializing colonized peoples into more civilized forms of modernity. Cricket served this purpose in the English speaking Caribbean, South Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and in the white settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia. The notion of ''cricket, the classics, and Christianity'' was seen by British Victorian elites as a way to bring order and civilization to the British Empire - at once a form of control over the masses and a way to inculcate them into the values and norms of an imperial notion of Britishness.

Elsewhere, soccer was ''exported'' by Europeans to Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. In this context, indigenous games and pastimes, suppressed since the first European expeditions overseas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, faded away or were gradually replaced with new sporting imports. For example, the game of ulama de cadera, or hip ulama - ulama meaning ''ball game'' - was once popular throughout Mesoamerica, but began to die away after the Spanish outlawed what they perceived to be a pagan game with inappropriate rituals, such as decapitation for the losers. The game itself, which is similar to volleyball but requiring the use of the hip rather than the hand, dates to around 1500 BC. Although it still survives in parts of Mexico, it is no longer central to Mexican culture, except as a focus for anthropologists, archeologists, and tourists. Soccer is now the national sport of Mexico, as it is throughout most of Central and South America, and most Mexicans have no idea of what ulama, one of the world's oldest sports, actually involved.

Sport, Race, and the Struggle for Freedom

At the start of the twentieth century notions of white European supremacy were simply assumed to be an objective, unquestionable fact. While Africans were often seen to be ''animal like'' in their nature, it was still assumed that whites were intellectually and physically superior to all other ''races of man.'' The newly emerging international sports arenas were one public space where this obvious superiority was seen to be confirmed. Given the importance of sport in reproducing dominant forms of hegemonic masculinity, it is not surprising that boxing, and heavyweight boxing in particular, came to be regarded as one of the prime avenues for demonstrating the attributes of white male strength, power, and courage. The symbolic significance of black and white athletes competing against each other in public as equals, and the fear of black success in the sporting arena, was such that sporting encounters began to take on wider political significance.

In this context Jack Johnson's successes in the boxing arena heralded a pattern of racial contestation that was to structure relations on the world's sporting fields for over a century. In 1908 Johnson became the first black World Heavyweight Champion. Given the racial politics of the Jim Crow era, Johnson's victory caused widespread consternation within wider white society and jubilation among blacks. The search then went out for a ''great White hope'' to reclaim the mantle of masculine supremacy from the black Texan. In order to prevent such threats to the symbolic racial order, the so called ''color line'' was redrawn when Johnson eventually lost his title which once again pre vented black boxers from competing against whites. The later achievements in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s of African American athletes such as the boxer Joe Louis, the athlete Jesse Owens, the baseball player Jackie Robinson, and the tennis player Althea Gibson, were subsequently seen by black people throughout the African diaspora as victories in the struggle for freedom from racial oppression.

Sport as a form of political resistance can be seen in the example of cricket in the Caribbean. While the imposition of European sporting forms led to both the extinction of indigenous games and an attempt at colonial governance over local populations, these very same conditions led to sports becoming a site for cultural contestation and ideological struggle. Campaigns for equality within the game of cricket thus paralleled wider struggles for freedom and emancipation from colonial rule. Thus, the campaign to allow a black player to captain the West Indies national cricket team - previously only white West Indians were deemed intelligent enough to assume such leadership roles - was achieved in 1960 when the captaincy was finally given to Frank Worrell. Increasingly, from the 1950s onwards, former colonized countries gained their independence, giving further impetus to the symbolic significance of international sporting competitions, especially against their former colonial masters.

The politics of protest through sport continued into the 1960s and 1970s as sport became an important vehicle through which racial oppression and injustice could be highlighted. The ''black gloved'' protest at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by Tommie Smith and John Carlos similarly drew attention to the human rights abuses that were taking place in America and elsewhere. Their simple but powerful protest also portrayed the ideological role of black athletes who were now able to compete in international arenas for western countries; when athletes succeeded on the field they were hailed as heroes at the same time that black people were denied full rights as citizens. The radical black athletes of the 1960s, best personified perhaps in the figure of Muhammad Ali, revealed the previously ignored racial politics of sport. This enabled a generation of black athletes to speak out, as previous generations dared not do, against discrimination in sports and society at large.

Nowhere was racial oppression more explicit than in the apartheid regime of South Africa, where a minority white population held complete power and control over the country's majority black African population. The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement led to a sporting boycott of the regime. This called attention to the suffering of South Africa's black population and it assisted the anti apartheid movement by exerting political pressure on the South African government. By further isolating South Africa from normal international relations, the boycott contributed to apartheid's eventual collapse in the early 1990s. Thus, sport - in Caribbean cricket squares, American sporting arenas, and South African rugby pitches, among other sites - has been central to the wider story of black diasporic struggles for freedom throughout the twentieth century.

Stereotypes and the Return of Racial Science in Sport

A persistent legacy of nineteenth century racial science is the ideology of absolute racial difference and its alleged effects on human behavior. While notions of a direct biological link between race, intelligence, and the propensity to commit criminal acts has been effectively critiqued, the belief that a person's ''race'' is linked to abilities on the sports field remains strong. For example, using limited and often contradictory evidence, it continues to be asserted that ''West African blacks'' are genetically predisposed to power and speed events such as sprinting and jumping, while ''East African blacks'' are meant to have special properties that allow them to dominate endurance events like long distance running.

Stereotypes attributing to black people natural advantages compared to whites when it comes to running and jumping have affected structural and strategic dimensions of sports. Sociological research since the 1970s has shown how ''stacking'' - the disproportionate placing of black athletes into certain positions assumed to be more suited to their ''natural'' abilities - has occurred in many sports from American football to rugby league and rugby union. Linked to stacking is the concept of ''centrality,'' which suggests that certain positions are more important to a team's chances of winning as these require players to make cognitive decisions, as opposed to merely reflexive or instinctive physical reactions to opponents' movements. These ''central'' positions are thus seen to be more suited to white players who have a greater ability to ''read the game,'' thus relegating black players to positions believed to require pure physical ability and little if any cognitive ability. In American football, for instance, this supported a stacking pattern in which there was a disproportionate number of white quarterbacks and black wide receivers. This pattern reproduced a racial ideology focused on innate biological differences and led people to overlook socially produced conditions in which coaches and school teachers selected and encouraged players from different racial backgrounds to play in certain positions. Even when stacking patterns have become less apparent, the race logic used in the sports media recategorizes players by, for example, suggesting that ''new'' black quarterbacks are somehow more ''athletic'' than their white counterparts, and play in a more ''physical'' way.

Black success in certain elite sports is often ''explained'' by these alleged natural differences, further reifying the idea of race. This undermines black athletic excellence by implicitly linking it with an inherent genetic disposition shared by the entire ''black race'' and ignoring the dedication, hard work, and ability of individual athletes who happened to be racialized as black. Such stereotypes persist in the face of evidence to the contrary. For example, the record breaking times of British long distance runner Paula Radcliffe or the ''super human'' achievements of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong are often seen by scientists and journalists in terms of dedication and their almost fanatical commitment to training to compete at the highest level. Rarely is white achievement in sport explained by biological or genetic racial attributes. This preserves the myth of black athletic superiority as well as ideological notions of ''natural'' racial difference. This illustrates the power of hegemonic racial ideology in framing how people interpret success or failure in the world's sporting arenas and how the discredited legacy of racial science continues to inform sports science discourse today.

Sport and Race Today

Success in sport has been one way for subordinated racial and ethnic minority groups to register protests and fight discrimination in the wider battles for recognition and inclusion. In the 2000 Sydney Olympics, for example, Cathy Freeman became the first Australian Aborigine to win an Olympic gold medal, and was widely seen as a symbol of Australia's attempts to come to terms with its racist treatment of Aboriginal peoples. A century after Jack Johnson's arrival on the international boxing scene, black athletes now compete successfully in sports such as tennis and golf that were previously the preserve of whites only. The achievements of sportsmen and women of color have only recently been recognized as part of the wider struggle for racial justice and equality.

A danger is that the perceived level playing field of sport can serve an ideological function by leading people to assume that western societies in particular have achieved a meritocracy that transcends the structural correlates of a racialized social order. Similarly, rather than using their position to speak out on issues of racial injustice and social inequality, contemporary millionaire black celebrity athletes often align themselves with commercial programs bringing them monetary rewards. However, research continues to show that, despite diversity on many playing fields, the power positions in the structure of sport organizations are controlled by white men who coach, manage, and own teams. Similarly, the abuse of athletes of color by spectators and occasionally by fellow players and managers continues to be a feature of domestic and international competitions in sports such as soccer. The myth of race is sustained by the apparent ''obviousness'' of racial difference in sports performance, while the continuance of racism is often disavowed.

The centrality of sport as a cultural practice in many nations and the pervasiveness of ideas about racial difference mean that the complex articulation of ''race'' and ''sport'' will persist well into the twenty first century. Critical research on the ways that sports serve as sites for ''race related'' identity formation for all racialized minorities as well as majority white populations is needed in order to develop more nuanced and effective anti racist strategies. Research into non English speaking contexts is also required to explain the many forms of racism that exist alongside the local and national context of particular sporting cultures.

References:

1. Bass, A. (2002) Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

2. Beckles, H. & Stoddard, B. (Eds.) (1995) Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. Manchester University Press, Manchester.

3. Bloom, J. & Willard, M. (Eds.) (2002) Sport Matters: Race, Recreation and Culture. New York University Press, New York.

4. Booth, D. (1998) The Race Game: Sport and Politics in South Africa. Frank Cass, London.

5. Carrington, B. & McDonald, I. (Eds.) (2001) ''Race,'' Sport and British Society. Routledge, London.

6. Edwards, H. (1969) The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Free Press, New York.

7. Guttmann, A. (1996) Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. Columbia University Press, Columbia.

8. Hartmann, D. (2003) Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

9. Hoberman, J. (1997) Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Mairner Books, Boston.

10. Ismond, P. (2003) Black and Asian Athletes in British Sport and Society: A Sporting Chance? Palgrave, Basingstoke.

11. James, C. L. R. (1994 [1963]) Beyond a Boundary. Serpent's Tail, London.

12. Mangan, J. A. & Ritchie, A. (Eds.) (2005) Ethnicity, Sport, Identity: Struggles for Status. Routledge, London.

13. Marqusee, M. (2005) Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. Verso, London.

14. Melling, P. & Collins, T. (Eds.) (2004) The Glory of Their Times: Crossing the Colour Line in Rugby League. Vertical Editions, Skipton.

15. Miller, P. & Wiggins, D. (Eds.) (2004) Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth Century America. Routledge, London.

16. Shropshire, K. (1996) In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. New York University Press, New York.

17. Vasili, P. (2000) Colouring Over the White Line: The History of Black Footballers in Britain. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh.

18. Williams, J. (2001) Cricket and Race. Berg, Oxford.

Back to Sociology of Sport.

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Race and Sports - Sociology of Sport - iResearchNet

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Race and sports have been in complex articulation since the nineteenth century, yet a critical sociology of sport and race has only developed substantially since the 1990s. In the 1960s a few academic studies and journalistic accounts examined segregation and racial discrimination ... READ MORE HERE

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Learn about the history and current status of wild wolves in California.

The Story of Journey, California's First Wolf Since the 1920's

In 2011, a wolf tagged as OR-7 traveled over 1,000 miles and made his way from Oregon into California as a lone wolf looking for a mate. When he stepped foot into California, he was the first wild wolf in our state since the 1920's. OR-7, nicknamed "Journey", traveled back into Oregon, found a mate, and started his pack. He and his mate had five litters between 2014 and 2018. Journey and his mate paved the way for a population of wild wolves in California.

As of 2022, there are three known packs of wolves in Northern California: the Lassen, Beckwourth and Whaleback packs. The Lassen pack is named after the area that they inhabit. The original breeding male of the pack, CA-08M, is OR-7's son, and the breeding female is tagged as LAS01F. This pack had a litter of pups each year between 2017 and 2019.

CA-08M, the original breeding male, has not been documented since the 2019 breeding season. Since June 2019, a black male wolf has been documented as the new breeding male. In 2020, he sired a litter of 9 pups, and a litter of 6 in 2021.

Historical Background of Wolves in California

Clear historical records from 1750 to 1850 indicate that wolves were once present in the Coastal Range from San Diego to Sacramento when Europeans first began exploring and settling these areas. From 1850-1900, wolves were seen in Shasta County and in the central Sierra Nevadas. These historical reports of wolves appear in various regions within California, surfacing as Europeans shifted from the coasts toward inland forests, mountains, and plains.

European settlement changed the landscape of California from wilderness to a land marked by missions, towns, ranchos, agricultural development, and roads. In addition to this encroachment on wolf habitat, market hunters soon decimated prey populations that would have supported wolves, marking an era of conflict that would lead to the decline of wolves in California.

Wolves in Indigenous Culture

The wolf was known among many California tribes statewide, as demonstrated through language, legends, artwork, ceremonial garb, and creation stories. By the time Europeans arrived, there were more than 80 distinct tribal languages spoken in California, most of which had clearly differentiated words for wolf, coyote, fox, and dog. Some tribes revered the wolf as sacred, though representations of the wolf vary from tribe to tribe.

The Decline of Wolves in California

As with other mass wolf extermination campaigns throughout the United States during the early 20th century, California state legislature enacted bounty laws to eradicate wolves and coyotes to protect livestock. By the middle of the 1920s, wolves in California seemed to have disappeared entirely. One was trapped in San Bernardino County in 1922, and another, reported to be the last to be captured in the state, was trapped in Lassen County in 1924.

Although the U.S. Forest Service estimated that approximately 50 wolves existed in Lassen, Tahoe, El Dorado, Stanislaus, and Rouge River National Forests as recently as 1937, there was little evidence to suggest that any wolves were actually present. The occasional trapping of wolves still occurred in California, but it was concluded that these individuals had been released from captivity and were not from a thriving local population.

The Origins of Wolf Conservation

By the 1960s, the only gray wolves left in the lower 48 states were found in northern Minnesota and Isle Royale, Michigan. Fortunately, early conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Adolph Murie began sounding the call for wolf conservation, noting their important ecological role. The subsequent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped further increase public support for wolves, and in 1973, they received protections under the federal Endangered Species Act.

With the reintroduction of wolves into the northern Rockies and Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, wolves began to make a comeback. As wolf recovery has progressed, scientists have learned more and more about the wolf's important role in restoring natural ecosystem dynamics, which you can learn more about on our Biodiversity page.

A Bright Future for California's Wolves

Almost two decades after the first wolves were brought to Yellowstone in the 1990s, wolf populations have naturally begun to increase out of established and thriving packs. As a result, wolves have begun expanding their range and returning to California on their own in recent years. Though time will tell what the future holds for wolf populations and distribution across the state, conservation organizations such as California Wolf Center are optimistic.

The Klamath-Siskiyou and Modoc Plateau regions in northern California and southwestern Oregon could support up to 470 wolves, according to a feasibility study conducted by the Conservation Biology Institute. It's our hope that conservation efforts and public awareness will help pave the way for more packs like the Lassen pack to once again call California home.

How You Can Help Support Wolves

We can't achieve our goal of wild wolf recovery without your help! Here are some ways you can take action for wolves today.

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Wolves in California | California Wolf Center

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Learn about the history and current status of wild wolves in California. In 2011, a wolf tagged as OR-7 traveled over 1,000 miles and made his way from Oregon into California as a lone wolf looking for a mate. When he stepped foot into California, he was the first wild wolf in our state since the 1920's.

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Last year, the bison was chosen as America's first national mammal, joining the bald eagle as a symbol of America. I started writing this post with only a mild interest in bison. But the more I learned, the more I want to learn, and this blog post took on a life of it's own. The bison have a fascinating history, unique appearance, and they present complex challenges in the present day. They are a symbol of the untamed West. Their near-extinction is a testament to the self-centeredness of "civilized" men and their resurgence shows that we can learn from and try to correct our mistakes.
Why did people nearly push the bison to extinction?
To settle the West, early settlers needed to conquer the Native Americans, and the bison were everything to the Natives. The bison provided meat for food and hides for tepees. So the US Army launched a campaign to kill the bison so they could control the Native Americans. Without this sad and complicated part of our history, many of us would not live in the homes we live in today. We live here at the expense of the people and the animals that used to call this home.
A Timeline of the American Bison

1500s

An estimated 30-60 million bison roam North America, mostly on the great plains.

1830

Mass destruction of the bison begins.

1860

Construction of the railroad accelerates human settlement and killing of bison.

1870

An estimated 2 million are killed on southern plains in one year.

1872-1874

An average of 5000 bison were killed every day of these three years. That's 5.4 million bison killed in 3 years.

1884

The bison population reaches it's lowest point. Around 325 wild bison are left in the United States - including 24 in Yellowstone.

1910

Due to conservation efforts, bison increase to 1,000 in the US.

2017

Today there are 500,000 bison in the US, including 5,000 in Yellowstone.

Now that the bison are no longer endangered, why are the Yellowstone bison special?
Yellowstone is the only place in the continental US where wild, free ranging bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times. It is also the largest bison population in the country. And it's one of the only purebread (no cattle genes) herds left. The other two other locations with purebred buffalo are in Utah and in South Dakota.
Are all of Yellowstone's bison descended from the 24 in 1884?
No. In 1902 the U.S. Army brought 21 bison from two private herds to Yellowstone. These animals were bred with those already in Yellowstone.
What challenges do the Yellostone bison still have?
Limited space, and disease. When not facing mass destruction by man, bison are actually pretty good at reproducing; most adult females get pregnant every year. But the Park land is finite and inevitably the bison population wants to spread outside the Park. They do leave, since there is no fence around the exterior of the Park, and cattle ranchers in Montana do not want the bison roaming around and spreading disease to the cattle. The current solution to this problem is for Yellowstone to regularly capture about 1,000 bison per year and ship them to Native American tribes where they are slaughtered.
What disease are the cattle ranchers concerned about?
Up to 60% of Yellowstone bison test positive for brucellosis, which ironically, the bison got from cattle in the early 1900s. Brucellosis has been mostly eliminated from cattle across the US, but persists in the Yellowstone ecosystem's bison and elk.
Do bison breed with cattle?
Yes (heard of beefalo? Cattalo?) but human intervention is required. Even though bison and cattle are different genus (usually animals need to be same genus to have offspring), they are able to breed and produce offspring that, surprisingly, are fertile (unlike some other hybrids like the mule). The study of hybrids is a whole different subject.
What is the hump of a bison made out of?
Mostly muscle and bone. The spinous processes and associated muscles of the buffalo are much longer than those of similar mammals. The hump is one reason they are able to survive tough winters. It enables them to use their heads as snowplows in the winter so they can find grass.

The bison is a great symbol for America for many reasons. For better or for worse, it's a history of our determination to settle the West. The resurgence of the bison shows that every once in a while, man does something that is not just for himself.

To the many people who know more about bison than I do: I wrote this post based on information found on the national park website, and the fish and game website. If there are untruths or errors let me know!

Jessica Heath

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Photo by Greg Farley, winner of the Flat Creek photo contest. Taken last fall in either TNP or YNP. Last year, the bison was chosen as America's first national mammal, joining the bald eagle as a symbol of America. I started writing this post with only a mild interest in bison.

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The Harlem Hellfighters were an African-American infantry unit in WWI who spent more time in combat than any other American unit. Despite their courage, sacrifice and dedication to their country, they returned home to face racism and segregation from their fellow countrymen.

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The Harlem Hellfighters were an African-American infantry unit in WWI who spent more time in combat than any other American unit. Despite their courage, sacrifice and dedication to their country, they returned home to face racism and segregation from their fellow countrymen.

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Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with the stated intention of preventing espionage on American shores.

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon-states with a large population of Japanese Americans. Then Roosevelt's executive order forcibly removed Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 120,000 people-the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, forcibly removing 21,000 of its residents of Japanese descent from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

Anti-Japanese American Activity

Weeks before the order, the Navy removed citizens of Japanese descent from Terminal Island near the Port of Los Angeles.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.

In January, the arrestees were transferred to prison camps in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota, many unable to inform their families and most remaining for the duration of the war.

Concurrently, the FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese American residents on the West Coast, seizing items considered contraband.

One-third of Hawaii's population was of Japanese descent. In a panic, some politicians called for their mass incarceration. Japanese-owned fishing boats were impounded.

Some Japanese American residents were arrested and 1,500 people-one percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii-were sent to prison camps on the U.S. mainland.

Photos of Japanese American Relocation and Incarceration

John DeWitt

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, believed that the civilian population needed to be taken control of to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

To argue his case, DeWitt prepared a report filled with known falsehoods, such as examples of sabotage that were later revealed to be the result of cattle damaging power lines.

DeWitt suggested the creation of the military zones and Japanese detainment to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle. His original plan included Italians and Germans, though the idea of rounding-up Americans of European descent was not as popular.

At Congressional hearings in February 1942, a majority of the testimonies, including those from California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, declared that all Japanese should be removed.

Biddle pleaded with the president that mass incarceration of citizens was not required, preferring smaller, more targeted security measures. Regardless, Roosevelt signed the order.

War Relocation Authority

After much organizational chaos, about 15,000 Japanese Americans willingly moved out of prohibited areas. Inland state citizens were not keen for new Japanese American residents, and they were met with racist resistance.

Ten state governors voiced opposition, fearing the Japanese Americans might never leave, and demanded they be locked up if the states were forced to accept them.

A civilian organization called the War Relocation Authority was set up in March 1942 to administer the plan, with Milton S. Eisenhower from the Department of Agriculture to lead it. Eisenhower only lasted until June 1942, resigning in protest over what he characterized as incarcerating innocent citizens.

Relocation to 'Assembly Centers'

Army-directed removals began on March 24. People had six days notice to dispose of their belongings other than what they could carry.

Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was evacuated, including 17,000 children under age 10, as well as several thousand elderly and disabled residents.

Japanese Americans reported to "Assembly Centers" near their homes. From there they were transported to a "Relocation Center" where they might live for months before transfer to a permanent "Wartime Residence."

Assembly Centers were located in remote areas, often reconfigured fairgrounds and racetracks featuring buildings not meant for human habitation, like horse stalls or cow sheds, that had been converted for that purpose. In Portland, Oregon, 3,000 people stayed in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Facilities.

The Santa Anita Assembly Center, just several miles northeast of Los Angeles, was a de-facto city with 18,000 incarcerated, 8,500 of whom lived in stables. Food shortages and substandard sanitation were prevalent in these facilities.

Life in 'Assembly Centers'

Assembly Centers offered work to prisoners with the policy that they should not be paid more than an Army private. Jobs ranged from doctors to teachers to laborers and mechanics. A couple were the sites of camouflage net factories, which provided work.

Over 1,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans were sent to other states to do seasonal farm work. Over 4,000 of the incarcerated population were allowed to leave to attend college.

Conditions in 'Relocation Centers'

There were a total of 10 prison camps, called "Relocation Centers." Typically the camps included some form of barracks with communal eating areas. Several families were housed together. Residents who were labeled as dissidents were forced to a special prison camp in Tule Lake, California.

Two prison camps in Arizona were located on Native American reservations, despite the protests of tribal councils, who were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Each Relocation Center was its own "town," and included schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock. Each prison camp "town" was completely surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

Net factories offered work at several Relocation Centers. One housed a naval ship model factory. There were also factories in different Relocation Centers that manufactured items for use in other prison camps, including garments, mattresses and cabinets. Several housed agricultural processing plants.

Violence in Prison Camps

Violence occasionally occurred in the prison camps. In Lordsburg, New Mexico, prisoners were delivered by trains and forced to march two miles at night to the camp. On July 27, 1942, during a night march, two Japanese Americans, Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura, were shot and killed by a sentry who claimed they were attempting to escape. Japanese Americans testified later that the two elderly men were disabled and had been struggling during the march to Lordsburg. The sentry was found not guilty by the army court martial board.

On August 4, 1942, a riot broke out in the Santa Anita Assembly Center, the result of anger about insufficient rations and overcrowding. At California's Manzanar War Relocation Center, tensions resulted in the beating of Fred Tayama, a Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) leader, by six men. JACL members were believed to be supporters of the prison camp's administration.

Fearing a riot, police tear-gassed crowds that had gathered at the police station to demand the release of Harry Ueno. Ueno had been arrested for allegedly assaulting Tayama. James Ito was killed instantly and several others were wounded. Among those injured was Jim Kanegawa, 21, who died of complications five days later.

At the Topaz Relocation Center, 63-year-old prisoner James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed by military police after walking near the perimeter fence. Two months later, a couple was shot at for strolling near the fence.

In October 1943, the Army deployed tanks and soldiers to Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California to crack down on protests. Japanese American prisoners at Tule Lake had been striking over food shortages and unsafe conditions that had led to an accidental death in October 1943. At the same camp, on May 24, 1943, James Okamoto, a 30-year-old prisoner who drove a construction truck, was shot and killed by a guard.

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, 23-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to a Japanese prison camp. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued in Korematsu v. United States that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment.

Korematsu lost the case, but he went on to become a civil rights activist and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. With the creation of California's Fred Korematsu Day, the United States saw its first U.S. holiday named for an Asian American. But it took another Supreme Court decision to halt the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Mitsuye Endo

The prison camps ended in 1945 following the Supreme Court decision, Ex parte Mitsuye Endo. In this case, justices ruled unanimously that the War Relocation Authority "has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure."

The case was brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants from Sacramento, California. After filing a habeas corpus petition, the government offered to free her, but Endo refused, wanting her case to address the entire issue of Japanese incarceration.

One year later, the Supreme Court made the decision, but gave President Truman the chance to begin camp closures before the announcement. One day after Truman made his announcement, the Supreme Court revealed its decision.

Reparations

The last Japanese internment camp closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066 in 1976, and in 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment.

Sources

Japanese Relocation During World War II. National Archives.
Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord and R. Lord.
Lordsburg Internment POW Camp. Historical Society of New Mexico.
Smithsonian Institute.

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Japanese Internment Camps: WWII, Life & Conditions | HISTORY

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Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, be incarcerated.

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The Black Oklahomans, Arthur B. Tolson shows that Africans, both Moors and Angolans, free and enslaved, accompanied Coronado's expedition, which crossed the Oklahoma panhandle in 1541. William Loren Katz's Black Indians and Art Burton's Black, Red, and Deadly cite an early Black presence in Oklahoma, then called "Indian Territory."

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After the United States Civil War, state governments that had been part of the Confederacy tried to limit the voting rights of Black citizens and prevent contact between Black and white citizens in public places.

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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. It was part of the Black Power movement, which broke from the integrationist goals and nonviolent protest tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The BPP name was inspired by the use of the black panther as a symbol that had recently been used by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent Black political party in Alabama.

continue reading about the Black Panther Party...
Search the Catalog for Records on the Black Panther Party Social Networks and Archival Context - Black Panther Party

Prominent Black Panther Party Members

Resources

Selected Records Relating to the Black Panther Party

Black Panther Party Introduction, continued

The BPP's philosophy was influenced by the speeches of Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam, the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of the Communist Party of China, and the anti-colonialist book The Wretched of the Earth ( Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The BPP's practice of armed self-defense was influenced by African American activist Robert Williams, who advocated this practice against anti-black aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in his book Negroes with Guns (1962). Newton and Seale canvassed their community asking residents about issues of concern. They compiled the responses and created the Ten Point Platform and Program that served as the foundation of the Black Panther Party. The ten points are:

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We want full employment for our people.

We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.

We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.

We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Because of its practice of armed self-defense against police, as well as its Communistic and revolutionary elements, the BPP was frequently targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program as well as by state and local law enforcement groups. However, despite its militant stance, the BPP also provided free breakfast for school children, sickle cell anemia screening, legal aid, and adult education.

The National Archives and Records Administration contains over 2,400 records relating to the Black Panther Party. Most of these records are textual records, but there are also motion pictures, sound recordings, and photographs.

Barbara Easley

Barbara Easley-Cox began working with the Black Panther Party as a student at San Francisco State University. She met and married Donald L. Cox, the Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, and immediately became more closely affiliated with the Party. In addition to leading the Oakland chapter, they also worked in the New York and Philadelphia chapters as well. After Donald was accused of conspiracy to murder a Panther who was found to be an informant, the couple fled to Algeria and then to North Korea. Easley is credited with helping to spread the international reach of the Party. She later moved to Germany, where she published the newspaper Voice of the Lumpen, worked with soldiers, and lived there until 1973. Upon her return to the United States, Easley moved to Philadelphia where she focused on community development work. After her retirement from social work, Easley continued to consult and volunteer in a variety of community-based capacities which she continues today.

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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality.

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Lesson Plan: How an Eighth-Grade Civics Class Helped Reverse the Last Conviction in the Salem Witch Trials

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Students will learn about the power of civic action to achieve justice — even 329 years later. Then, they will propose their own plan to rectify a wrong in their own community.

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The Women’s Rights Movement, 1848–1917 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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The fight for women’s suffrage in the United States began with the women’s rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century. This reform effort encompassed a broad spectrum of goals before its leaders decided to focus first on securing the vote for women. Women’s suffrage leaders, however, disagreed ov…

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In 2019 several US states have passed laws which effectively ban abortion, and others have taken steps to drastically restrict abortion access.

Here are 10 key facts about this frightening crackdown on reproductive rights.

1. This has been a long time coming

In 1973 the US Supreme Court ruled that abortion was legal in the landmark case Roe v. Wade. Anti-choice activists and politicians have been working to overturn this decision ever since, and we're now seeing the fruits of that labour. The attacks on Roe also ramped up when President Trump appointed two new judges to the Supreme Court, both of whom have expressed anti-choice views.

But it's important to recognize that the law is not the only factor that determines whether people can access abortions.

Since 1973, anti-choice activists have been steadily chipping away at abortion access. They have done this partly by creating financial and logistical barriers which make it difficult or impossible for people to get abortions - despite what the law says.

2. It's already hard for many people to get abortions in the US

Take Alabama as an example. In May, Alabama's governor signed into law a draconian bill that could punish doctors who perform abortions with life in prison. But in practice abortion is already inaccessible for many people in Alabama.

The Guttmatcher Institute found that in 2014, 93% of Alabama counties had no clinics that provided abortions. This means many people in Alabama have to travel to other states to access abortions. Even then, many people simply cannot afford to end their pregnancies.

This is because Alabama, like many other states, does not include abortion in the list of healthcare services that people with low incomes can access through Medicaid (government-assisted health insurance). Currently all states have to provide public funding for abortions in cases of rape, incest or threat to life - but in many places these exemptions will be irrelevant if harsh new laws come into effect.

3. There are nowhere near enough abortion clinics in the US

There are six states in the US which have only one clinic providing abortion. Twenty-seven major US cities and much of rural America qualify as abortion "deserts", where most people live more than 100 miles away from an abortion provider.

One way that anti-choice activists force essential services out of existence is through targeted regulation of abortion providers, known as TRAP laws. TRAP laws are unnecessary licensing requirements which can make it difficult for abortion service providers to stay open.

For example, state authorities might specify how wide the corridors can be in a building where doctors carry out abortions, the size of parking spaces, or how far away from schools the premises must be. These requirements have nothing to do with patient safety. Instead they are used as a way to put so much pressure on abortion services that they are forced to close.

4. Some states have effectively banned all abortions

Alabama's new law bans all abortion from the time a "woman [is] known to be pregnant" - with no exceptions. This is the harshest law yet.

Five states - Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana - have passed bills which prohibit abortion after about six weeks - before many people even realize they are pregnant.

5. But it's not just outright bans we're worried about

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 42 abortion restrictions were enacted between 1 January and 15 May 2019 alone. This includes measures like prohibiting certain common types of procedure and requiring parental consent for teenagers who need abortions.

6. These new laws will cause deaths and injuries

Anti-abortion laws do not stop or reduce abortions, but they do make them dangerous.

When carried out with the assistance of a trained health-care provider in sanitary conditions, abortions are one of the safest medical procedures available. But when abortions are restricted or criminalized, people are forced to seek unsafe ways to end pregnancies.

Worldwide, an estimated five million women are hospitalized each year for treatment of abortion-related complications and about 47,000 women die.

The US has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, and states with more restrictive abortion laws already have higher rates of both infant and maternal mortality. That's why these new laws are a recipe for disaster for women's health.

7. These laws are discriminatory

People with low incomes - teenagers, people of colour, migrants and refugees - are hardest hit by abortion restrictions because it is more difficult for them to pay, travel or take time off work.

African-American women are three or four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women in the US, and this shameful inequality will likely be entrenched by new laws making pregnancy more dangerous.

These laws are also another blow to LGBTI people, who have suffered a sustained attack on their rights under the Trump administration. Trans people in the US already face huge barriers to accessing reproductive healthcare, and this raft of new laws will further exclude them

8. Trump's anti-abortion agenda doesn't just affect people in the US

In 2017 President Trump reinstated and expanded a policy called the "global gag rule". This rule states that any overseas organization which receives US global health funding cannot even mention abortion as part of their counselling or education programs-even if the money for these particular programs does not come from the US.

Even if providers think that a pregnancy will put a woman's health at risk, they cannot tell her that abortion is an option or direct her to a safe provider. A recent study found that this policy is making a broad range of services less accessible, including contraceptive services, HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, cervical cancer screening and support for survivors of gender-based violence

9. 73% of Americans want abortion to remain safe and legal

The lawmakers putting these extreme restrictions on abortion access do not represent the views of most Americans.

An independent poll released in January 2019 found that two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in "all" or "most" cases, and 73% are opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade

10. The fight is not over!

None of the abortion bans passed this year has yet taken effect, and abortion is still legal in all 50 states (as of 11 June 2019).

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and others have vowed to fight back and lawsuits have already been filed in several states.

On 31 May Planned Parenthood won a court order to keep Missouri's only abortion clinic open on the day it was due to close. Kentucky's "six week" bill has been temporarily blocked.

Previously, similar bills have been struck down as unconstitutional in states including Iowa and North Dakota.

In May thousands of people took part in coordinated rallies, calling on states to #stopthebans, and people all over the world continue to raise their voices in defence of reproductive rights.

For more information on why access to abortion is a human right, see Key Facts on Abortion.
Further Reading

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10 things you need to know about abortion laws in the US

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10 key facts about the new anti-abortion laws introduced in US states including Alabama and Missouri - part of a long battle to repeal Roe v. Wade

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Is there anything else you want to learn about? Any other questions and topics you want to cover in this class? Write them as a comment here.