How We Robbed Mexico in 1848

Written in 1916, when American troops were once again marching through Mexico, this sharp historical polemic dissects the conquest of 1848 with remarkable candor. Robert Harrison Howe names the theft plainly: the Mexican-American War was not destiny or defense, but robbery, orchestrated by slaveholding interests hungry for new territory and politicians who manufactured justifications for invasion. Howe reconstructs the political maneuvering, the manipulated tensions around Texas, the manufactured border incident at the Rio Grande, and the relentless press campaign that turned public opinion toward war. But what elevates this beyond period criticism is Howe's insistence that the pattern repeats itself. The annexation of half a nation in 1848, he argues, follows the same logic of exploitation that drives contemporary interventions abroad. This is history as indictment, written with the urgency of a man who sees the same forces at work in his own time. For readers interested in how America understands its own imperial past, or how early 20th-century critics viewed the nation's founding myths, this remains a bracing, unflinching account.