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La Gran Linea: Mapping the United StatesMexico Boundary, 1849-1857. By Paula Rebert. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xx, 259 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-292771 10-X. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-292-77111-8.) The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 is one of the most significant and most controversial events in North American history. This conflict and its outcome furthered the "manifest destiny" of the United States initiated at the conclusion of the American Revolution with the Treaty of Paris and advanced by the Louisiana Purchase; it impeded Mexican participation in North American affairs for over a century; and it widened the separation of the United States and Mexico. Even into the present, a principal symbol of that division has been the approximately fifteen-hundred-mile boundary between the two countries first described and ordered...