The Mexican Revolution ─ A Brief History With Documents

During the Mexican Revolution a remarkable alliance of peasants, working and middle classes, and elites banded together to end General Porfirio Diaz’s thirty-five year rule as dictator-president and created a radical new constitution that demanded education for all children, redistributed land and water resources, and established progressive labor laws. In this collection, Mark Wasserman examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of the revolution and carefully untangles the shifting alliances of the participants. In his introduction Wasserman outlines the context for the revolution, rebels’ differing goals for land redistribution, and the resulting battles between rebel leaders and their generals. He also examines daily life and the conduct of the revolution, as well as its national and international legacy. The accompanying selected sources include political documents along with dozens of accounts from politicians and generals to male and female soldiers, civilians, and journalists. Collectively they offer insight into the reasons for fighting, the politics behind the war, and the revolution’s international legacy. Document headnotes, a chronology, selected bibliography, and questions for consideration provide pedagogical support.

Mark Wasserman (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He teaches courses on the history of Latin America and its revolutions. Dr. Wasserman is the author of Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War, Persistent Oligarchs: Elites and Politics in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1910–1940, and Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution: The Native Elite and Foreign Enterprise in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1854–1911. He is also the co-author of Latin America and Its People, Second Edition, with Cheryl E. Martin, and A History of Latin America, Third Edition, with Benjamin Keen. He has previously served as President of the Council on Latin America History.