Splendid Liberators
Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
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- 18,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
This immersive epic reveals the origins of the American empire and the lives of those who promoted it and those who resisted it.
In 1898, the United States gained an empire, and— many allege—lost its soul. In just a few dramatic weeks, American forces wrested Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish rule, but their “splendid little war” had a long and difficult aftermath, with the “liberators” facing resistance and resentment and their country tempted by imperial ambition.
In Splendid Liberators, the prizewinning historian Joe Jackson offers an epic narrative of the Spanish-American War, an overlooked conflict that nonetheless created the template for later adventures and misadventures abroad. Jackson brings our first major overseas intervention to full, teeming life with portraits of its many leading characters, such as the prophetic Cuban revolutionary José Martí, the Philippines’ dignified President Emilio Aguinaldo, the reluctant annexationist President William McKinley, and the impetuous warrior Teddy Roosevelt. We meet the legendary but embattled nurse Clara Barton and the fiery critic of empire Mark Twain, along with many others, from a young recruit buried alive to an African American “Buffalo Soldier” who joined the Philippine insurgency.
Along the way, Jackson explores the heroic theaters of San Juan Hill and Manila Bay, the disease-wracked encampments of Florida and Cuba, and the smoky halls of Congress, where politicians debated the ethics of territorial aggrandizement and the extension of manifest destiny beyond the North American continent.
Prodigiously researched, Splendid Liberators draws on American, Cuban, and Filipino sources to reveal the reality of the conflict. The result is a major work of narrative nonfiction that gauges the consequences of a pivotal war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The epic stories of little-remembered rebels against imperialism are resurfaced in this sweeping saga of the Spanish American War from journalist Jackson (The Thief at the End of the World). At the end of the 19th century, Spain's brutal colonial rule over Cuba and the Philippines prompted revolutionaries in both nations to make overtures to America. They "realiz too late that they'd exchanged one master for another," Jackson writes. Drawing on records he collected in both countries, Jackson spotlights fascinating episodes of resistance. These include the captivating story of David Fagen, an enlisted man in the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers, who witnessed such "ferocious racial hatred" from white fellow soldiers—against both civilian populations and enlisted Black Americans—that one night he "stuffed as many revolvers into a gunnysack as would fit" and joined the Filipino rebellion. "David Fagen became a wraith, a legend," Jackson writes—taunting notes from him began to appear outside American garrisons, antagonizing the officers and exhorting the enlisted men to join the Filipino cause. Military leadership grew obsessed with hunting him down; a local eventually claimed to have killed Fagen, but many believed that this itself was a ruse of Fagen's design. While collating astounding stories like these, Jackson shows how the conflict became the template for every one of America's "small wars" that followed, from Vietnam to Iraq. It's a vigorous and clear-eyed accounting of the brutality that birthed the "American Century."
