Coast-to-Coast Empire

William S. Kiser is author of Turmoil on the Rio Grande: The Territorial History of the Mesilla Valley, 1846-1865 and Dragoons in Apacheland: Conquest and Resistance in Southern New Mexico, 1846-1861.

"Coast-to-Coast Empire is an indispensable history of American expansion chronicling the impact of the borderlands and the West on the sectional crisis and Civil War."-Samuel J. Watson, author of Peace Keepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821-1846 "To mainstream U.S. historians, New Mexico was a distant, unremarkable backwater of America in the nineteenth century, but this powerful book turns that conventional wisdom on its head. Centering New Mexico in U.S. history, Kiser convincingly argues that New Mexico stood at the crossroads of Manifest Destiny and was the real geopolitical prize in the contest between Southern slavery and Northern freedom before and during the Civil War."-Durwood Ball, author of Army Regulars on the Western Frontier "Kiser's provocative study is sure to reignite debates over such perennial issues as U.S. expansion into Mexican provinces, U.S. troops colliding with American Indian tribes in New Mexico, and the intrusion of slavery in the territories."-Joseph G. Dawson III, author of Doniphan's Epic March: The First Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War "Kiser brings order and clarity to the complexities of American Manifest Destiny and New Mexico's key role in the political and economic evolution of the Southwest Borderlands. Well conceived and compellingly argued, Coast-to-Coast Empire enables new understanding of the formative years between Mexican independence and the end of the U.S. Civil War."-Andrew E. Masich, author of Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867 "William Kiser's Coast-to-Coast Empire probes nineteenth-century nation-build-ing in the New Mexico Borderlands. The primary focus is the Southwest's stra-tegic value to the imperial agenda of the United States from 1821 to 1868. Kiser's approach makes it possible to foreground the significant and too-often-over-looked link between America's mid-nineteenth-century expansion across the Southwest and the sectional crisis unraveling the Republic...Coast-to-Coast Empire makes an important contribution to current histor-ical inquiry...Kiser's book is incisive, deeply researched, engagingly written, and care-fully argued."--- New Mexico Historical Review