AMY S. GREENBERG is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University. She is a leading scholar of Manifest Destiny and has held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. Her previous books include Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire and Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City.
“The best account we have of the politics of Mr. Polk’s War ... If
one can read only a single book about the Mexican-American War,
this is the one to read.” —James M. McPherson, The New York Review
of Books
“Amy Greenberg's original and moving narrative of the U.S. invasion
of Mexico relates the gradual loss of enthusiasm for waging what
began as a popular war of conquest. How peace ultimately
prevailed is the most surprising part of her story.” —Daniel Walker
Howe, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought
“No less a warrior than Ulysses S. Grant had good reason to decry
the war with Mexico as ‘wicked.’ In Amy S. Greenberg’s
dramatic and deeply engaging political narrative, the reader gets
the grit of the campaign and rich insight into the fascinating
historical actors who stage-managed (or resisted) this
all-important, under-studied war. In these fast-turning
pages, we see clashes among political opportunists, moments of
eloquence and pathos-all under the rising sun of American power.”
—Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, authors of Madison and
Jefferson
“A Wicked War gives the U.S.-Mexican War a personal dimension and
immediacy that has been lacking until now. Amy Greenberg
makes us live the war vicariously through the lives of the aging
patriarch Henry Clay who lost a son in Mexico, the husband-and-wife
presidential team of James K. and Sarah Polk, the lanky and
somewhat disheveled Abraham Lincoln still learning about politics,
and others. This is a rare melding of great story-telling and
analysis of an era that shaped not only the United States but the
entire North American continent.” —Andrés Reséndez, author of A
Land So Strange
“A Wicked War, with its emphasis on politics rather than military
history, does for the Mexican-American war what James McPherson did
for the Civil War with Battle Cry of Freedom, greatly broadening
our understanding of the war. Certainly Professor Greenberg’s book
will immediately become the standard account of the Mexican War, at
last giving it an important place in the history of the United
States. This book restores my faith in the merits of narrative
history.” —Mark E. Neely, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Fate of Liberty
“A well-rendered, muscular history of a war whose ramifications are
still being carefully calibrated." —Kirkus Reviews
"The seldom-sung Mexican War emerges as one of America's most
morally ambiguous and divisive conflicts in this illuminating
history." —Publishers Weekly
“Amy S. Greenberg’s new history elegantly unfolds the story of the
war through the lives of five politicians ... [Greenberg]
immerse[s] her readers in the early 1840s ... Gripping.” —Maria
Montoya, San Francisco Chronicle
"A provocative main idea in a freshly original narrative."
—Booklist
“Greenberg writes taut political history, full of chapter-ending
cliffhangers and characters who feel like real people.”
—Zocalo Public Square
“In her absorbing and valuable A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln,
and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, Penn State’s Amy S. Greenberg
does a splendid job of vivifying this disgraceful episode in
American history.” —Bill Kauffman, Reason
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