Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 223 pp. $49.95 cloth; $18.95 paper

Extract

In this book, Paul Foos seeks to rescue the Mexican-American War from its status as a forgotten war, a status it has long shared with the Korean War. His approach is in keeping with recent work on the history of war from the perspective of the ordinary soldier, the regulars and militiamen who did the fighting at the front, not from the perspective of the generals. He thus mines a rich and fruitful seam of first person accounts written by soldiers themselves in the form of letters and memoirs long overlooked by historians. He seeks to correct two standard interpretations of the war. One of these, in the triumphalist tradition, interprets the conflict as a limited war that reflected and unleashed American “nationalism;” the other sees it as a victory for moralistic political elites who rescued the nation from the reckless expansionism of Southern extremists by limiting the acquisition of Mexican land in the final settlement. Both interpretations—and the second in particular—spotlight the leading men, insisting it was a war that the “masses” did not “understand, nor did they care” (9). Readers of this lively and eye-opening book are unlikely to put much credence in the received wisdom.