American war reporting came of age with the Mexican War, just as our nation's newspapers were gaining new prominence through the headline-hawking "penny press." Indeed, the Mexican War was the first to be comprehensively reported in the daily press, with at least thirteen full-time correspondents covering the military campaigns conducted south of the border.

Tom Reilly highlights the synergistic relationship between battlefield reporters and the rise of modern commercial journalism, providing riveting eyewitness accounts of the war and new insights into the press's profound impact on...