Mexican-American War

New York, NY

This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.

City of Rensselaer, NY

This memorial in Rensselaer, across the Hudson from the city of Albany, honors the sailors who served aboard the succession of U.S. Navy warships to carry the name USS Albany. The dates trace a long naval lineage: a mid-19th-century sailing sloop-of-war from the age of the Mexican-American War, followed by later steam and ironclad-era vessels, and on through the cruisers of the World War II and Cold War Navy. Each ship passed its name to the next, so the honor roll of "Albany" shipmates spans nearly a century and a half of American sea power.