Shortly before his fourteenth birthday, John Christopher Columbus Hill left home with his father and older brother to join the ill-fated 1842 Texas expedition to Mier, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to end any questions over ownership of Texas. John Hill's capture and subsequent adoption by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna is one of the most fascinating and curious to come out of this extraordinary episode in Texas history. After a series of escalating events, including Mexican Gen. Adrian Woll's sudden siege of San Antonio, the Texas Rangers sent out a call for volunteers. On Christmas Day, 1842,...

Shortly before his fourteenth birthday, John Christopher Columbus Hill left home with his father and older brother to join the ill-fated 1842 Texas expedition to Mier, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to end any questions over ownership of Texas. John Hill's capture and subsequent adoption by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna is one of the most fascinating and curious to come out of this extraordinary episode in Texas history. After a series of escalating events, including Mexican Gen. Adrian Woll's sudden siege of San Antonio, the Texas Rangers sent out a call for volunteers. On Christmas Day, 1842,...

In this new telling of Mexico's Second Empire and Louis Napoleon's installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, Maximilian and Carlota brings the dramatic, interesting, and tragic time of this six-year-siege to life.
From 1861 to 1866, the French incorporated the armies of Austria, Belgium--including forces from Crimea to Egypt--to fight and subdue the regime of Mexico's Benito Juarez during the time of the U.S. Civil War. France viewed this as a chance to seize Mexican territory in a moment they were convinced the...