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De Bow's Review was the leading magazine of the South during the antebellum period. This historical study examines the journal's meaning-making about Mexicans and reveals how the magazine, as the principal voice of the section's plantation, commercial, banking, and mining interests, promoted the image of a broken, degenerate Mexico and proclaimed that only the "Anglo-Saxon race" was capable of bringing progress amid the American project of empire-building. Though Mexicans' racial status was unresolved in the 1840s, De Bow's Review correspondents later assigned to them the status of non-masters unit to self-govern and, therefore, fit only to serve and to be ruled by their Anglo-American conquerors. The context of the correspondents' claims of Mexican inferiority suggests that they simultaneously engaged in an unspoken struggle to differentiate the South from the North by defining Mexican inferiority in relation to Southern values of bravery, honor, and dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Minnesota Dakota Conflict in 1862 was among the bloodiest American Indian wars. One of its last events took place in Mankato on December 26, 1862, when 38 Dakota men were hanged in the largest mass execution in US history. This work examines the coverage of the war and the hanging by frontier editor John Wise's weekly newspaper, the Mankato Record. This research contributes to the history of US Indian-white relations and the frontier press, and it adds evidence to the guard-dog theory of the press. The idea is that mainstream media personnel will tolerate those outside the dominant group, but only until external threats appear. Thus, ultimately, a " free" press serves to perpetuate the status quo, not challenge it. This was especially true in 1860s frontier America, when newspapers, written by whites for whites, were key promoters of manifest destiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]