Confederate Patriot Journalist And Poet

Jos Agust n Quintero (1829-1885) was a Cuban American from New Orleans, Louisiana who skillfully and energetically represented the Confederacy in northeastern Mexico during the Civil War. This dynamic multilingual leader helped coordinate the defensive plans necessary to protect the Texas border and insure the procurement of war material and provisions vital to the Southern Army. He is a relatively unknown but fascinating figure in many ways: a native of Cuba who participated in his country's struggle for independence against Spain, an outstanding writer of Cuban patriotic poetry, and an American who was highly respected and recognized for his legal and journalistic accomplishments, as well as his significant diplomatic contributions to the Southern Cause. This is the story of a man of extraordinary culture, an extremely intelligent, capable, and determined immigrant who believed passionately in a cause and dedicated much of his short life to it....

José Agustín Quintero (1829-1885) was a Cuban American from New Orleans, Louisiana who skillfully and energetically represented the Confederacy in northeastern Mexico during the Civil War. This dynamic multilingual leader helped coordinate the defensive plans necessary to protect the Texas border and insure the procurement of war material and provisions vital to the Southern Army. He is a relatively unknown but fascinating figure in many ways: a native of Cuba who participated in his country’s struggle for independence against Spain, an outstanding writer of Cuban patriotic poetry, and an American who was highly respected and recognized for his legal and journalistic accomplishments, as well as his significant diplomatic contributions to the Southern Cause. This is the story of a man of extraordinary culture, an extremely intelligent, capable, and determined immigrant who believed passionately in a cause and dedicated much of his short life to it.

Illusions of Empire is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican sources to depict a borderlands conflict with lasting ramifications.

This book traces and analyses the relationship between Britain and Spain in its various forms since 1489. So often viewed as antagonistic rivals in history, the two countries are here compared and contrasted in order to shed light on their international connection and how this has evolved over time. Mark Lawrence reflects on the similarities of their composite monarchies, their roles as successive projectors of European global power, and the common fondness for peculiarly patriotic expressions of Christianity through the ages. At the same time, Lawrence is alert to recognising other ways in which Britain and Spain have seemed worlds apart in their respective corners of the European continent. He examines how British Protestants excoriated Spain in a 'Black Legend', while Catholic propagandists dismissed rising English power as the work of pirates and heretics during the early modern period. In a series of chronological chapters rich with a diverse range of sources, Anglo-Hispania beyond the Black Legend considers the cultural exchanges which flourished amidst the growth of travel and new ideas in the 18th century, the surprising alliances of the 19th century and the shared international causes of the 20th. Whereas Spaniards feared or admired Britain for its successful political and fiscal system, the book convincingly argues, Britons romanticised Iberia for its supposed failures. It ultimately concludes that British campaigns in the 1700s and 1800s established a Romantic Spain in memoir culture which the 20th century gradually dissolved in the ideological cauldron of the 1930s and the advent of mass tourism.

During the turbulent years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a squall of violence and lawlessness swept through the Nueces Strip and the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. Cattle rustlers, regular troops, and Texas Rangers, as well as Civil War deserters and other characters of questionable reputation, clashed with Mexicans, Germans, and Indians over unionism, race, livestock, land, and national sovereignty, among other issues. In A Crooked River, Michael L. Collins presents a rousing narrative of these events that reflects perspectives of people on both sides of the Rio Grande. Retracing a path first opened by historian Walter Prescott Webb, A Crooked River reveals parts of the tale that Webb never told. Collins brings a cross-cultural perspective to the role of the Texas Rangers in the continuing strife along the border during the late nineteenth century. He draws on many rare and obscure sources to chronicle the incidents of the period, bringing unprecedented depth and detail to such episodes as the “skinning wars,” the raids on El Remolino and Las Cuevas, and the attack on Nuecestown. Along the way, he dispels many entrenched legends of Texas history—in particular, the long-held belief that almost all of the era’s cattle thieves were Mexican. A balanced and thorough reevaluation, A Crooked River adds a new dimension to the history of the racial and cultural conflict that defined the border region and that still echoes today.