Diplomatic Days

xii+338 pages with frontispiece and plates. Octavo (8 1/4" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's red cloth with gilt lettering to spine and cover with pictorial in original pictorial jacket. First edition. Edith O'Shaughnessy was a journalist, biographer, film screenwriter and, as the wife of United States Chargé d Affaires in Mexico, Nelson O'Shaughnessy, during the early years of the Mexican Revolution she was both a witness and a participant in Mexican political affairs during the presidency of Francisco I. Madero and Victoriano Huerta. During Nelson O'Shaughnessy's diplomatic service in Mexico (1911 1914). Edith wrote A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico (1916) and Diplomatic Days (1917). Both consist of a series of letters written to the author's mother. Diplomatic Days covers the fall of the long regime headed by Porfirio Diaz and the revolution which brought the "democratic" government of Francisco Madero to power. A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico covers events in 1913 and 1914, when Madero was overthrown in a violent coup (the "Ten Tragic Days") by Victoriano Huerta on February 13, 1913 and murdered by the new regime. In A Diplomat's Wife, O Shaughnessy has no illusions about Huerta's alcoholism and bloody-mindedness, sometimes displaying a condescending attitude based mostly on the racial background of the indigenous Huerta. However, she defends him as "a necessarily iron-fisted leader, doing his best to control an unruly populace." Condition: Corners and spine ends gently rubbed, pages uncut. Jacket small chips at corners and spine ends with some rubbing else better than very good in a very good to fine jacket.