Lanterna Rally

Author: Evan Rothera

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

This dissertation makes three arguments. First, it insists the time period of this study, 1860-1880, was not simply an era of discrete civil wars. Rather, this was a period in which many individual conflicts the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the U.S. Civil War, and the French Intervention in Mexico formed a larger war pitting democracy and republicanism against monarchy and aristocracy. Many people understood the entangled nature of their world. Soldiers circulated from one country to another and fought in wars seemingly not their own. Policymakers ignored violations of neutrality laws. Mexicans began celebrating the Fourth of July. This was a time of rapprochement, particularly between the U.S. and Mexico, where much of the hatred and bitterness engendered by the U.S. War with Mexico evaporated.Second, this dissertation argues that the period covered by this study was a Pan-American moment marked more by cooperation among the people of the U.S., Mexico, and Argentina than conflict. The historiography overemphasizes anti-Latin American sentiment. However, people in all three countries corresponded with each other, traveled to different nations, and worked to create stronger economic, political, and cultural ties.Third, it contends that all three countries faced similar problems of order and disorder, not a problem of Mexicanization. In other words, while Mexico was often disordered and chaotic during this period, so too were the United States and Argentina. Victors had to pacify people who did not subscribe to their worldview. How victors sought to impose order and how the vanquished and some discontented victors resisted, reveals a common, if not identical, hemispheric history. By 1880, however, each country had embarked on a similar path to stability.