A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
Often forgotten and overlooked, the U.S.-Mexican War featured false starts, atrocities, and daring back-channel negotiations as it divided the nation, paved the way for the Civil War a generation later, and launched the career of Abraham Lincoln. Amy S. Greenberg's definitive history of the 1846 conflict paints an intimate portrait of the major players and their world, including the birth of both America's first national antiwar movement and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Amy Greenberg
Amy Greenberg is a historian of antebellum America (1800-1860) with a particular interest in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world in the decades before the Civil War. Her research has been chronologically focused, but topically broad. She has published four books: a narrative history of the U.S.-Mexican War (A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico), an investigation into the role that the ideology of manifest destiny played in both foreign affairs and American society at home (Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire), and a study the relationship between gender, culture, and urbanization (Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City). Greenberg has also published a general history of the territorial expansion of the United States (Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents). She tends to focus on the transformation of gender roles in most of her work, from volunteer firefighting in 1820s Baltimore to reactions to William Walker's Nicaraguan filibustering adventures in the mid-1850s, but is also intrigued by partisan politics and the growth of America’s empire. Amy Greenberg is currently researching and writing a history of nineteenth-century attitudes towards imperialism, focused on ordinary Americans. In 1999 Penn State awarded her the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2009, Greenberg was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.