War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of Key Battles of the Mexican-American War.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And I'm joined by Sean McIver.

As always, Sean, how are you, sir? Good. How are you?

I'm just daddy. I'm looking forward to getting into this. In our last episode, we talked about

the Battle of Buena Vista, which was a pretty close battle, at least for a while. The Americans eventually

prevailed, but they were on the ropes for a while.

But Zachary Taylor finishes his career as a general in the Mexican-American War undefeated.

He's four and out in battles.

We also talked about what was going on in the Mexican states or provinces, New Mexico, and

all to California, or just California, and how the U.S.

government sent the army over and took over both of those areas. What we're going to do this

time is push pause on the military narrative, as I often do in my series, and we are going to

put aside generals and Commodores and presidents and senators and politicians and all that.

We're going to go down to the ground level.

We're going to look at the common soldier.

...