AbstractsHistory

Traditional military and political histories have tended to dominate historical scholarship on the U.S.-Mexican War. Despite a few notable recent publications, the input of social and cultural historians has been extremely limited. Several scholars over the last three decades—notably Robert Johannsen, Paul Foos, and Amy Greenberg—have drawn attention to the prevalence of non-sanctioned violence outside of organized combat during the war. These incidents ranged from petty theft and vandalism to rape, murder, and occasional mass killings. Scholars have offered some speculation on the social and cultural forces driving these acts, but they remain a peripheral and largely unexplored element of the war’s history. Politicians, veterans, and the American press fiercely debated the truth and significance of non-sanctioned violence and directly contested its popular memory.This thesis presents an in-depth case study of perhaps the best-documented incident of non-sanctioned violence during the war: the killing of a group of unarmed Mexican civilians by American volunteers near the Mexican city of Saltillo in 1847. Using theory on collective memory, the study traces the rapid proliferation of multiple versions of the massacre, analyzing the ways in which various authors represented and understood it. It also connects the killings to broader historical trends in the United States—most notably collective social violence, Indian warfare, and the myth of the frontier—to show this incident as the extension of older cultures of violence.