Like other American wars, that with Mexico comes in for its share of retelling. Here as usual the emphasis is placed on military action, and the sources are mostly published documents, memoirs, and older secondary accounts. As an amateur historian Dufour has not attempted any new insights or interpretations. As a professional journalist he has not even told a rousing story, for his style is pedestrian and cluttered with detail.
Dufour has even less to say about the Mexicans than most writers of this genre. It begins to appear that if their side of the story is to be told, they will have to do it themselves. Nineteenth-century Mexicans—Balbontín, Boa Bárcena, Ramón Alcaraz and his collaborators, Olavarria y Ferrari, and others—cleared away some of the underbrush, even though the tragic events were closer and presumably more painful to them than to the present generation. The first Mexican historian to write a modern, balanced, readable account of events in Mexico during the American invasion will have no trouble finding readers on both sides of the border.
