Cable of Fate: The Zimmermann Affair and The Great Southwestern War of 1917
Cable of Fate: The Zimmermann Affair and The Great Southwestern War of 1917

Author: John Eric Vining

Publisher: Page Publishing Inc

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1684090628

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On both sides of the turn of the twentieth century, there emerged a style of writing that was a distant kin to the modern historical novel. It was known as Les Guerres Imaginaires, which can basically be translated into “The Imaginary War.” It was a literary device used to tell how future wars might occur and be fought. This type of novel was written by military authors who sought to mold and enhance their foresight with intricate historical and political analyses. Examples of this genre include “The Battle of Dorking,” a 1871 short story in Blackwood’s Magazine by Sir George Tomkyns Chesney; The Great Naval War of 1887, written in 1886 by Sir William Laird Clowes and Commander Charles N. Robinson; The Great War of 189-, A Forecast, by Rear Admiral Philip Colomb, written in 1893; The War Inevitable (1908), by Alan H. Burgoyne; The Valor of Ignorance (1909), by Homer Lea; and two great novels of the 1920s, Sea Power in the Pacific (1920) and The Great Pacific War (1925), by Hector Bywater. John Eric Vining resurrects a mirror image of this genre to look back into history and explore what might have happened if Mexico had taken Germany’s 1917 Zimmermann Telegram seriously and attempted to recapture the American Southwest at the height of World War I. While this is fantastically unbelievable at first glance, a further analysis is warranted. What you might find is that not only was a Mexican invasion of the American Southwest quite possible in 1917, the real surprise is that it did not happen in the actual history of World War I! Take the plunge and see for yourself if it might have been possible for the United States and Mexico to have fought the Great Southwestern War of 1917.

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists
Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists

Author: Matthew Hild

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-02-25

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0820336564

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Historians have widely studied the late-nineteenth-century southern agrarian revolts led by such groups as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's (or Populist) Party. Much work has also been done on southern labor insurgencies of the same period, as kindled by the Knights of Labor and others. However, says Matthew Hild, historians have given only minimal consideration to the convergence of these movements. Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion. Third-party movements fared progressively worse in Georgia and North Carolina, where little such coalition building had occurred, and in places like Tennessee and South Carolina, where almost no history of farmer-labor solidarity existed. Hild warns against drawing any direct correlations between a strong Populist presence in a given place and a background of farmer-laborer insurgency. Yet such a background could only help Populists and was a necessary precondition for the initially farmer-oriented Populist Party to attract significant labor support. Other studies have found a lack of labor support to be a major reason for the failure of Populism, but Hild demonstrates that the Populists failed despite significant labor support in many parts of the South. Even strong farmer-labor coalitions could not carry the Populists to power in a region in which racism and violent and fraudulent elections were, tragically, central features of politics.