The best term to sum up this anthology is national Festschrift. Published to commemorate the liberation of Mexico from the French-supported empire of Maximilian, it includes a wide sampling of materials by and about protagonists, antagonists, and bystanders.

Some of the contemporary materials reproduced are Mexican documents—decrees of Juárez and reports of declarations by Congress or the Supreme Court. There are also chunks of correspondence to and from Juárez and articles by Mexican commentators such as Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Francisco Zarco, and Ignacio Ramírez. France is represented by fifty pages from the transcripts of the Corps Legislatif, the United States by Matías Romero ’s reports on Senate debates and public opinion. Nearly a hundred pages are given over to a memorandum on the trial of Maximilian.

Most of these contents are highly predictable, given the occasion for the work. The editor and publishers have made some of the selections more accessible by reprinting them, and they will naturally appeal strongly to Mexican nationalists. For Americans they will provide an introduction to a dramatic period of Mexican history, but researchers will still need to go to the original sources. The introductory essay is unfortunately pedestrian, giving an adequate background for each document without any penetrating flashes of insight about the period as a whole.