Sam Chamberlain's Mexican War: The San Jacinto Museum of History Paintings - Tapa dura

This striking full-color collection of over 160 paintings, with text by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann, is a book of uncommon visual pleasure and historical importance. Sam Chamberlain was a fascinating character, a writer, artist, and adventurer whose ribald life story rivals those of Jack Crabb in Little Big Man and Harry Flashman in the Flashman novels. Private Sam Chamberlain was the most prolific artist of the war with Mexico of 1846-1848. In hundreds of lively watercolors, he provided upclose views of the battles, marches, atrocities, massacres, seductions, and tall tales of the Mexican War. No official account has ever matched the immediacy of his portrayals - in watercolor and in prose - of this critical event in the history of the U.S. and Mexico. This widely researched volume marks a major event in Mexican War history, and provides insight into the colorful imagination of one of that war's most notable rogues. Based largely on the collection of 147 watercolors now owned by the San Jacinto Museum of History, the book reproduces these treasures for the first time in color. Readers will greatly enjoy Sam Chamberlain's vivid, occasionally humorous paintings, and will be fascinated by the story of his life and how he came to produce these wonderful scenes. The book represents an intriguing detective story that has not yielded the final word on the elusive Chamberlain, his adventures, and the whereabouts of his other works. This handsome volume includes over 160 pictures, maps, detailed picture captions, and quotes from Chamberlain's original manuscript, "My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue." Also included is an extensive introduction detailing SamChamberlain's life as a hero in both the Mexican and Civil wars.

William H. Goetzmann is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has authored and edited more than a dozen volumes. Before his retirement he was the Jack S. Blanton Chair in American Studies and History at the University of Texas, Austin.