HTY 300:Revolution; Professor Moon's Library Instruction: Mexican Revolution (1910-1924)

A stirring, authoritative account of the Mexican Revolution, told through the lives of its infamous rebel-outlaws: Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata Villa and Zapata vividly chronicles the decade of bloody events that followed the eruption of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and made legends of the rebels Francisco "Pancho" Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Mexico's was the first massive social revolution of the twentieth century, visiting economic, cultural, and racial strife on a country already exploited by oppressive officials and crippled by poverty, but also offering hope to its people. The ruthless Villa and his army of ex-cowboys in the north and Zapata, recruiting his infantry from the sugar plantations of the south, successfully waged a devastating war on two fronts and brought down a string of autocrats in Mexico City. But the two men failed to make common cause and ultimately fell victim to intrigues more treacherous than their own.

Alan Knight's comprehensive two-volume history of the Mexican Revolution presents a new interpretation of one of the world's most important revolutions. While it reflects the many facets of this complex and far-reaching historical subject it emphasises its fundamentally local, popular and agrarian character and locates it within a more general comparative context. Volume I analyses the Porfirian old regime - its politics and ideology and the patterns of socio-economic and, above all, agrarian change which the regime encouraged, within the dynamic context of global capitalism. it shows how these factors combined to produce the 1910 revolution, in which a resurgent urban liberalism joined in uneasy alliance with popular rebellion. Triumphant in 1911, the alliance collapsed in 1911-13, as the liberal experiment was undermined by popular revolt and finally terminated by counter-revolutionary coup. Volume 2 begins with the army counter-revolution of 1913, which ended the liberal experiment, installed military rule and gave renewed stimulus to revolutionary mobilisation, in which the forces of Villa and Zapata were prominent. Dr Knight recounts and analyses the major campaigns of 1913-14 and offers a fresh interpretation of the great schism of 1914-15, which divided the Revolution in its moment of victory, and which led to the final bout of civil war between the forces of Villa and Carranza. He considers the manner and significance of Carranza's ultimate triumph, and ponders the essential question: what had the Revolution changed?