In 1864, an ambitious and somewhat delusional 31-year-old Austrian archduke named Maximilian von Hapsburg set sail for Mexico with plans to invade and install himself as an enlightened despot, a ...

In “Habsburgs on the Rio Grande,” Raymond Jonas’s story of French-backed nation building in Mexico foreshadows the proxy battles of the Cold War. At the height of the American Civil War, the Hapsburg ...

Carlota tried to rule Mexico with her husband Maximilian I before their empire fell, breaking her heart and her mind. Empress Carlota, painted in 1865 by Albert Gräfle, took a very active interest in ...

"Maximilian of Mexico before the Execution," by Jean-Paul Laurens (Wikimedia Commons) It was the greatest challenge to the Monroe Doctrine until the Cuban missile crisis exactly 100 years later. In ...