A Wicked War
Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

Amy S. Greenberg's A Wicked War provides a narrative chronicle of the Mexican-American War, a crucial incident in American (and Mexican) history that's often reduced to a footnote on the road to Civil War. Greenberg's book focuses more on the war's politics than its military clashes, though she does......more

If Robert Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent was meant as a corrective to the popular impression of James K. Polk as an imperialist warmonger, "A Wicked War" is something of a corrective to the corrective. It doesn't necessari......more

This is, without question, one of the best books on the Mexican American War. Greenberg finds that the Manifest Destiny crowd justified the invasion and Polk carried it out. For the South, it was about adding slave states but it backfired. Only Texas, already a state by then, became a slave state. T......more

Greenberg's thesis is not very original as far as the way the Mexican American War is taught in public high schools today: President Polk was a bad guy who got us into an unnecessary war against a neighboring republic. However, Greenberg aims to get into the minds and thus motives of several key act......more

An enjoyable and fast-paced narrative history of the Mexican-American War through the eyes of President Polk, Henry Clay, and Congressman Abraham Lincoln. There are likely more thorough accounts of the war and the resulting expansion of the U.S. continent, but I doubt they're as enjoyable as Amy Gre......more