The first classroom reader devoted exclusively to nineteeth-century Mexican history, this volume brings together twenty-six essays and primary documents treating Mexico's Age of Caudillos. The readings—many by Mexican politicians, historians, and commentators and available here in English for the first time—are organized into four groups representing major eras in the early national development of Mexico: Independence, the age of Santa Anna, La Reforma and the French Intervention, and the Porfiriato.

The selections range from autobiography to political and economic history, from the history of ideas to philosophy and social history. The interpretive essays represent both traditional and revisionist views, while the primary materials comprise both political documents and contemporary personal accounts.

W. Dirk Raat is professor of history at the State University College of New York at Fredonia, and the author of Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas (1982) and Revoltosos: Mexico's Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (1981). With William H. Beezley, he is coeditor of Twentieth-Century Mexico (1986), also published by the University of Nebraska Press.

"Contains precisely the kinds of details on the lives of individuals which often escape our lectures but which give life and drama to the study of history."--South Eastern Latin Americanist