A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States

In the United States, the war with Mexico is generally seen through the lens of American expansion, as a conflict that established the American republic as a continental power. While historians in this country have studied at length the actions of the Polk administration, rarely have they examined the war from the perspective of political elites below the Rio Grande. In A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States, Timothy J. Henderson seeks to provide a corrective to this view, exploring the challenges that Mexican leaders faced as they vainly sought to forestall the American conquest of the Southwest.

The author’s objective, as he states in the first sentence of A Glorious Defeat, is to explain “why Mexico went to war with the United States in 1846, and why that war went so badly for Mexico” (p. xvii). The author’s definition of causation is a...