An educational book while still being a very good read. I knew some of this history but Jeff Guinn has included events I'd not read of before. Excellent book for those who love history wnd/ or western fiction.

this was a great history book, I enjoyed this type of book. The time period was really interesting and I enjoyed learning about this subject.

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion is a fascinating read on unknown to me events in history. Five stars.

I absolutely loved this book and the history. I learned a lot that I didn't know about Buffalo Soldiers, Texas Rangers and much more. This is a book I know my dad would love and I might have to get this for him.

Jeff Guinn has the talent to make history exacting and exciting, with parts of his book sometimes focusing on one or the other. The first part of War on the Border is the more exacting part as it introduces Mexican political rivalries and jockeying during a turbulent era for that country. Shifting allegiances, dominance of forces and broken promises made it not only a turbulent time for the leaders but precarious for their struggling people. Hard to know then which side to support or back.

The exciting part of the book occurs after Villa’s raid on Columbus. This may have been seen as the act that forged the Punitive Expedition, but it almost marked an intensification of border animosity that exists through today. Guinn highlights military and political strategies behind the scenes that are frequently not as prominent in classroom teachings of this era. More attention should have been given by those educators to that era…..for reasons concerning the border now.

History buffs will enjoy Guinn’s details. Readers with a new-found interest in this era and current events, will learn many new details previously omitted or glossed over in recounting SW history. Recommended. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title to review.

A solid book overall. Could feel like a slog at times with the amount of names to remember, but this is a period of American history that is overlooked, so I was glad to read it. It was interesting to see how much of our current border problems stem back from this era. I do with there had been more about the Zimmermann Telegram, and I feel the Texas Rangers were an afterthought in a book that included them in the subtitle.

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this history book.

Over 100 years ago the border with the United States and Mexico was only one or two misunderstandings from being a war, with repercussions that could have affected history and the world in many different ways. This savage bloodthirsty time full of massacres and atrocities inflicted by both sides is seldom discussed or taught, or if so grossly underplayed.

Jeff Guinn in his new work War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion tells of border strife, miscommunication, politics, land, water, racism and greed that happened in the opening decades of the twentieth century. I remember this being covered in high school, but only in one day, maybe and it was more a bandit attacked an American town, and the army went after him. Not the lengths the army went, the casualties nor the history that still haunts the area today.
The book covers the contentious history of Mexico and the US, from the beginnings to almost the present day. The massacres, refugees and the outside influence from Japan and German trying to influence American foreign policy is covered too. I had an idea about German influence, mainly from the comedy movie Three Amigos, but this book tells more about the advisors and observers who helped to train Mexican officials in a attempt to keep America busy during World War I.

The writing and the research, just like all of Mr, Guinn's book is very good and he tells the history well, covering both sides, and never leaving the reader confused or lost in what seems a simple narrative, but is actually loaded with many players each attempting to leave their mark. The saddest thing about the book is how little has changed at the border, nor our understandings of why things continue to happen. A great book for Father's Day, or for anyone who wishes to know more about southern border and its history.

Though it looks like this is about Pershing chasing Villa for attacking American ranches and towns in Texas it a lot more than that. There are two parts to this story, the first being how the 'Punitive Expedition' grew into an American invasion of Northern Mexico, and almost led to a shooting war between the US and Mexico. The second part of the story is a very detailed discussion of the political problems of Mexico at the turn of the century.

The approval for the Punitive Expedition came after multiple incursions over the border by Villa and other groups of bandits. Villa would come over the border, robe small towns, steal cattle and pretty much anything that wasn't tied down. But after he murdered all the men in a small Texas town the Texas Rangers were sent in. The Rangers turned out to be worse than the Villaistas who murdered any Tejan/Mexican they encountered whether they were insurgents or not.

Pershing was sent in with the vaunted Buffalo Soldiers and other Cavalry in the last major deployment of the US Cavalry. They also used cars, trucks and airplanes in their search for Villa. The constant incursions into Mexico when looking for Villa caused multiple problems for President Wilson as he decided whether to join the Allies in "The Great War". Eventually Pershing and the troops were pulled out without capturing Villa, but did kill a lot of his followers.

After 1911 when dictator Porfirio Diaz was overthrown after thirty-five years, turn of the century Mexico was in constant civil war with Villa in the North and Zapata in the South, and Carranza in Mexico City. It wasn't until 1920 that things settled down and the elected President was able to serve a complete term. But over those nine years, governments in Mexico City was like a revolving door with some leaders serving for months and multiple governments in the same year.

In the War on the Border, Jeff Gunn tells a story of cross border raids, disputed territory, and government intransigence on both sides of the US-Mexican border. He’s not talking about 2020 however, but rather the previous century. He takes the reader through the tumultuous 1900s along the US-Mexico border where at points no less than four men battled for control of Mexico and in a broader sense what it meant to be Mexican and the Mexican state. Pancho Villa drew the Americans into the conflict with a daring raid on a small US border town, which drew the United States into Mexico in an effort to capture/punish Villa which ended up looking sadly like it could’ve been ripped from the headlines of 2020.

Mixed in with the army and National Guard where Texas Rangers—little more than vigilantes who hated Mexicans. Mexican leaders understandably were less than thrilled with the intervention into their country and somewhat banded together against the other outside enemy. The President and his cabinet officials at the time (Woodrow Wilson) appear at points just as dismissive of their Mexican counterparts as the White House occupants a century later.

War on the Border is well written and a suspenseful tale of a historical period that doesn’t get talked about as much. But I feel like Guinn went a little light on the innovation aspects of the conflict (airplanes automobile transport, last action of Buffalo soldiers for example.) I also feel like the connection to current events should’ve been stronger as opposed to something that was just tossed in at the very end.

The book is based on the “invasion” of Mexico by the United States in pursuit of Pancho Villa and the border wars that he and others instigated. The book is well written and the author does a very good job of making the events read more like a novel than dry history. He addresses the concerns of both sides of the conflict and what they were trying to achieve. The only misleading part of the book is that he includes the Texas Rangers in the title, but writes very little about them in the book itself. A good book for anyone interested in the history of the American west as it came to a close with World War I.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, my blog page and my Facebook page.

Free ARC from NET GALLEY

Great history work by a newspaper man.

Keeps all the hashtag buzzwords out, and writes the truth in EVERY CONFLICT; there is enough evil on BOTH sides.

He shows a refreshing reverence for the facts without slants

Impressive

Americans have been rediscovering the complexity of our history in recent years, and Guinn’s contribution on the subject is an invaluable one.

The education system should provide the average American with at least some grasp of the Mexican-American War, Pacho Villa, and the Zimmerman Telegram. However, how close the two countries came to having the ‘Border War’ escalate into full blown war is seldom addressed. Guinn masterfully takes Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico and uses it to provide a dramatic lens through which to examine relations between the neighbors from Mexico’s independence up to America’s entry into World War I. It is particularly interesting how Germany sought to exploit the Border War in an effort to keep Mexico in chaos and America distracted from Europe.

This book is remarkably well written, capturing both the historical details and dramatic telling which makes readers interested in those details. From Patton engaging in the first fully motorized military engagement to the joint construction of the first permanent border wall, there are events small and large which will fascinate and educate.

I enjoy histories written by non-historians (Guinn is a journalist) like this one. A good non-historian writing history has a reverence for accuracy and a desire for readability, but is not bogged down by the need to address whatever topics and buzzwords are big with the academic crowd at the time of writing. For example, at no point in this book is the word “other” used as a verb or a noun.

Although he does not engage in the rhetoric now deemed appropriate for oppressed groups, Guinn is very aware that the Mexicans and Tejanos of the World War I-era were often treated extremely badly by arrogant Anglos, especially in the form of the paramilitary Texas Rangers. But he also knows and writes about the cruelty that Mexicans inflicted on themselves and the Americans, whether they were US soldiers wandering cluelessly around a hostile north Mexico landscape in a semi-authorized foreign invasion, or US civilians who felt (wrongly) that they were safe on the north side of the Rio Grande.

All of the above has very loud reverberations in our own time.

Being an East Coast born-and-bred history nerd myself, I was surprised because US history of this era, as I was taught it long ago, was marvelously uncontaminated by the violence and mayhem portrayed in this book. All of this stuff in Mexico didn't even merit a mention. As I remember it, we were taught that it happened like this: the US very reasonably held itself away from Europe's self-immolation for as long as it could, and then the Zimmerman telegram came along, and well then we just had to march in and show them they couldn't mess with US vital interests.

You know, it's too late to correct the boring pedagogy of the past, but I can't help wondering if border violence and mayhem may have held the attention of teenaged boys more closely than memorizing Wilson's 14 points. Now that I think about it, the violence and mayhem in this book might even grab the attention of today's teenaged history nerd (if people like that still exist) – especially if he or she lives in the US southwest.

I enjoyed reading this book because it told me about a place and time that I don't know enough about, in a way which actually stands a chance of sticking in my brain.

I received a free advance electronic copy of this book for review. Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for their generosity.

Fascinating Read About Seemingly Forgotten History. Let's face it, these days (and even when this elder Millenial was in school in the late 80s - early 2000s), American schools (at least, perhaps, outside the Southwest) barely even teach World War 1 itself - much less the other actions that were going on as America was trying to stay away from that war. I knew of exactly one story from the Punitive Expeditions before reading this book, and that was the story of George S Patton's first ever motorized attack - one of the events early in his career that made him truly legendary. Here, Guinn does a truly remarkable job of setting the stage and scope of the entire situation, from its earliest beginnings (even repeatedly referencing when the Spanish first came to central America) through the fates of the key players he has spent the text explaining. If you've never heard of this last war on Continental US soil before, do yourself a favor and read this book. If you want to understand more context for a lot of the current simmering tensions along the US/ Mexico border... do yourself a favor and read this book. Yes, the actions themselves were now slightly over a century ago - but if you're able to read at all, it means that it was in the time of no further from you than your great-great grandparents, and these actions still reverberate to this day in the lands and minds of those whose own great-great grandparents (or more recent) were actively involved here. Very "readable" narrative, never sounds overly "academic", and well documented to boot. Very much recommended.

I recently finished an ARC provided to me by Simon and Schuster of an upcoming book by Jeff Guinn entitled "War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion." I am pleased to report that it was a satisfying read indeed. I have read extensively in the literature surrounding Pancho Villa and the famous punitive expedition commanded by "Black Jack" Pershing and have seen nothing that more clearly elucidates the major players in this convoluted international incident for the average reader. The writing style is clear, and the author gives more than enough background to what happened and why things worked out as they did, as well as the long term consequences of the incident. He is generally even-handed in his treatment of his subject matter although clearly influenced by current events. This book is more of a survey of the raid on Columbus, New Mexico within the larger context of the troubled events of the Mexican Revolution than a simple narrative history. The payoff is that the reader, especially the reader largely unfamiliar with this context, begins to get a new appreciation for the complexity of the often prickly relationship between modern day Mexico and the United States. I recommend the book to anyone interested in reading a fascinating historical tale that sheds a great deal of illumination on modern events on the U.S./Mexico border.