Hidalgo : Mexican revolutionary / Mark Lieberman

Includes index.

Part I: 1. A journey -- 2. Home again -- 3. A puzzling question -- 4. A revelation -- 5. Among the people -- 6. An ominous visit -- 7. An end and a beginning.

Part II: 8. The time has come -- 9. Action is everything -- 10. The Grito de Dolores -- 11. San Miguel: first blood -- 12. "We will all be heroes" -- 13. The price of liberty is high -- 14. The viceroy's plan -- 15. The priest as politician -- 16. On the run -- 17. To the bridge -- 18. A change of command -- 19. Generalissimo Allende -- 20. Portrait of a turncoat -- 21. Into the trap -- 22. Viva México!

A biography of the Mexican priest who helped organize the revolution that won Mexico's independence from Spain.

"By the middle of the eighteenth century, Mexico had become the crown jewel in the Spanish colonial collection. From the rocky hills along Guanajuato and Zacatecas, millions of tons of silver poured forth annually, in what appeared to be a never ending stream.The Mexican silver bullion financed the costly European wars of the mother country. It also gave the period its name. The Age of Silver was the most affluent period in the colony's history, which had begun when Cortez had beached his ships at Veracruz two hundred years before....For nearly three centuries the strata of Mexican society remained stable...but in the nineteenth century the earthquake of revolution suddenly and awesomely shook the foundation on which the colonial edifice had been so carefully constructed. When the smoke had cleared, the superstructure of greed and injustice was gone...This upheaval had begun in the most unlikely fashion, in 1765, with the journey of a creole boy and his brother." -- from Part One.