What do you think?
Rate this book
Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands
Following Zebulon Pike’s expeditions in the early nineteenth century, U.S. expansionists focused their gaze on the Southwest. Explorers, traders, settlers, boundary adjudicators, railway surveyors, and the U.S. Army crossed into and through New Mexico, transforming it into a battleground for competing influences determined to control the region.
Previous histories have treated the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire , William S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were interconnected parts of a process by which the United States effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of the region.
New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal government’s military commitment to the territory stemmed from its importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the 1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region’s social, cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems.
By focusing on the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.
Previous histories have treated the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire , William S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were interconnected parts of a process by which the United States effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of the region.
New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal government’s military commitment to the territory stemmed from its importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the 1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region’s social, cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems.
By focusing on the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.
- GenresHistory
288 pages, Hardcover
Published August 9, 2018
1 person is currently reading
20 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 7, 2020
An extraordinary analysis of the role of New Mexico in antebellum American geopolitics. This book stands firmly beside Hampton Sides’ renowned Blood and Thunder as one of the go-to works on the region and period.
Whereas Sides’ Blood and Thunder has a more captivating narrative -reading almost like a novel at times-, Kiser’s Coast-to-Coast Empire is more concise and draws more deliberate conclusions about the effects of history. Sides is the journalist of the two; Kiser, the academic.
I couldn’t put this down. In particular, Kiser’s thorough analysis of the role of peonage and slavery in shaping New Mexico territorial history constitutes, in my experience, almost unchartered territory. The books is worth reading for that chapter alone, notwithstanding his fascinating insights into the Santa Fe trade, the railroad era, and his succinct summation of the plighted efforts of the Confederacy to win New Mexico to their cause.
This should be required reading in schools across the State
Whereas Sides’ Blood and Thunder has a more captivating narrative -reading almost like a novel at times-, Kiser’s Coast-to-Coast Empire is more concise and draws more deliberate conclusions about the effects of history. Sides is the journalist of the two; Kiser, the academic.
I couldn’t put this down. In particular, Kiser’s thorough analysis of the role of peonage and slavery in shaping New Mexico territorial history constitutes, in my experience, almost unchartered territory. The books is worth reading for that chapter alone, notwithstanding his fascinating insights into the Santa Fe trade, the railroad era, and his succinct summation of the plighted efforts of the Confederacy to win New Mexico to their cause.
This should be required reading in schools across the State
Displaying 1 of 1 review