James K. Polk and the expansionist impulse

Sam W. Haynes is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he teaches courses in Texas history and early nineteenth century U.S. history. He received his BA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Houston. He is the author of Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (1990) and James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse (1996). He has edited several books, including Thomas Jefferson Green's Journal of the Texian Expedition Against Mier (1992) and, with Christopher Morris, Manifest Destiny and Empire: Essays in American Antebellum Expansionism (1997). He also served an associate editor of the reference work The United States and Mexico at War: Nineteenth Century Expansion and Conflict (1998). He has won several research fellowships, as well as a Dobie-Paisano Writers' Fellowship sponsored by the Texas Institute of Letters. He is currently working on a study of American attitudes toward Great Britain during the Jacksonian period.