Major funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for

the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining

Davis foundations.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Brian Balla.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians, and each week we explore the history of one

topic that's been in the news.

I want to start today in the Lone Star State.

It's the 1850s and Texas is going through some pretty big changes.

The Treaty of Guadalupe, Idaogo in 1848 had ended the Mexican-American War.

The deal gave the United States what is today the southwest region of the country.

The Texas is already a state by the time the Mexican-American war rolls around.

So what does the Treaty of Guadalupe mean for Texas?

Well, it gives Hispanics in the area the option to naturalize.

By signing this treaty, Mexicans living in Texas were able to declare themselves US citizens.

So all of a sudden, there are a bunch of Mexicans and Texans who are now American.

But the US has just finished a bloody war with Mexico.

So things were still pretty tense in states like Texas.

This tension comes to a head with a cart war in 1857.

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