Keep in mind that battle at The Alamo and subsequent battles leading to Texas independence from Mexico were NOT part of the Mexican-American War, and using that category for reference captures an idea rather than a fact.
That said; I found this article of interest, maybe you will as well.
Lessons from the Mexican-American war.
Victory in the Mexican War meant that the country gained Texas,
California, and everything in between, comprising most of what is now
New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. Next to the
War of Independence and the Civil War, the Mexican War was the most
important conflict laying the foundations of the United States as the
power that it is today. Yet the war was controversial at the time, and
the arguments and political maneuvering surrounding it still echo in
debates over two of the most pressing issues today: immigration policy
and presidential war powers.
Mexican textbooks claim that the American southwest was “stolen” and
will someday be regained. Radical elements in the movement championing
an “open border” between the U.S. and Mexico hope to someday fulfill
this irredentist ambition. They see a mass movement of people
overwhelming the “anglo” population of the border states.
...
Henry David Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond and wrote his essay on
“Civil Disobedience.” James Russell Lowell mocked the soldiers as
lower-class ruffians easily duped by appeals to patriotism.
Modern left-wing historians such as Paul Foos have followed Lowell’s
lead, seeing an army recruited from a “despised labor force” and the
war “critical in shaping the new exploitive social relations that would
characterize ‘free labor’ and American capitalism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.” The antiwar movement has changed little over the
centuries, and its vision for the country has not improved.
Contributed by Zero Ponsdorf on July 9, 2006 at 03:26 PM in , |