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Religion was crucial to how Americans and Mexicans saw their enemies and motivated themselves to contribute to the 1846-1848 war. The very strength of religious attitudes made controlling their effects difficult. Some U.S. troops attacked Mexican Catholicism, inspiring Mexican resistance. Conversely, Mexican authorities sometimes sought to limit religiously inspired resis-tance. Furthermore, at a key moment some Mexicans felt their religious concerns required them to violently oppose their own government. Mexican negotiators gained protections for Catholics in the territory transferred by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but anti-Catholic politicians in the U.S. Senate eliminated these protections before ratifying the treaty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we understand our histories and identities in terms of the transnational forces that shaped our nationalist frameworks, we discover substantial precedent for North American identities and cultural spaces. During and inunediately after the War of 1848, U.S. and Mexican liberal nationalists unsuccessfully crafted transnational identities in non-fiction essays and editorials. The historical overlap of Mexican and U.S. American New World liberalism, defined as it is by awkward and uneven parallelisms, modifies common assumptions about histories of liberal nationalism and national-identity formation. North American identities have arisen in strategic contexts defined by experiences of double-(un)consciousness, disjunction, fracture, and paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]