Torn Asunder

“Erika Pani deliver[s] a stellar publication on comparative U.S. and Mexican political history. If you are looking for a purely political examination that covers all the bases, you cannot do any better.”—Emerging Civil War

“A true borderlands treatment of the American Civil War, with an intriguing continental twist—this is not just the Civil War in the American West, it’s the Civil War on a global stage.”—Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books of 2025

“[T]here’s much to learn from this book, both about the 19th century and today.”—ReVista

“With extraordinary insight, Erika Pani has written a bold, exciting interpretation of the entangled history of the American hemisphere’s foremost republics as each struggled to defend its embattled nation.” –Don H. Doyle, author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War

“Torn Asunder is the most compelling, subtle, and convincing history of the two nineteenth-century North American republics ever written in English.”—Gregory Downs, University of California, Davis

“Brilliant, engaging. . . . A fresh and revealing look at the conflicts, parallel trajectories, intertwined developments, and intricate relations that spurred two decades of momentous change in the United States and Mexico.”—Paolo Riguzzi, research professor, Center for Historical Studies, El Colegio de México

“Groundbreaking. . . . Torn Asunder challenges scholars to ponder the deeply entangled histories of the United States and Mexico during the stunningly violent process that resulted in both evolving politically into modern nation-states.”—Patrick J. Kelly, associate professor of history, emeritus, University of Texas at San Antonio

“Erika Pani’s brilliant, entangled history of Mexico and the United States upends conventional wisdom about the turbulent 1800s and raises new questions about the fragility of North America’s republican experiment.”—Frank Towers, coeditor of Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s

“Not only the best attempt at writing a comparative history of the mid-nineteenth-century North American civil wars but also the only one that really knows Mexico and takes it seriously.”—Pablo Mijangos y González, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in History, Southern Methodist University

“A paradigm-shifting interpretation of how crisis tore apart Mexico and the United States at the same time, Torn Asunder is a truly significant contribution to the field.”—Will Fowler, University of St. Andrews