Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1794 1876) is one of the most famous, and infamous, figures in Mexican history. Six times the country s president, he is consistently depicted as a traitor, a turncoat, and a tyrant the exclusive cause of all of Mexico s misfortunes following the country s independence from Spain. He is also, as this biography makes clear, grossly misrepresented.Will Fowler provides a revised picture of Santa Anna s life, offering new insights into his activities in his bailiwick of Veracruz and in his numerous military engagements. The Santa Anna who emerges from this book is an...

The night before D-Day, light infantry and a detachment of Royal Engineers landed by gliders at Pegasus Bridge, which spanned the Caen Canal. Quickly overwhelming the guards, they managed to hold the bridge and help prevent German reinforcements from reaching the British landing beaches. Will Fowler provides a detailed blow-by-blow account of this classic wartime raid.

Often translated as revolt, a pronunciamiento was a formal, written protest, typically drafted as a list of grievances or demands, that could result in an armed rebellion. This common nineteenth-century Hispano-Mexican extraconstitutional practice was used by soldiers and civilians to forcefully lobby, negotiate, or petition for political change. Although the majority of these petitions failed to achieve their aims, many leading political changes in nineteenth-century Mexico were caused or provoked by one of the more than fifteen hundred pronunciamientos filed between 1821 and 1876.The...

Behind every pronunciamiento, a formal list of grievances designed to spark political change in nineteenth-century Mexico, was a disgruntled individual, rebel, or pronunciado. Initially a role undertaken by soldiers, a pronunciado rallied military communities to petition for local, regional, and even national interests. As the popularity of these petitions grew, however, they evolved from a military-led practice to one endorsed and engaged by civilians, priests, indigenous communities, and politicians.
The second in a series of books exploring the phenomenon of the...

In mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, garrisons, town councils, state legislatures, and an array of political actors, groups, and communities began aggressively petitioning the government at both local and national levels to address their grievances. Often viewed as a revolt or a coup d etat, these pronunciamientos were actually a complex form of insurrectionary action that relied first on the proclamation and circulation of a plan that listed the petitioners demands and then on endorsement by copycat pronunciamientos that forced the authorities, be they national or regional, to the...