Spanish-American War Research Articles

How Tourist, Business, and Colonization Maps Shaped North American Views of Cuba, 1898-1913

This article will survey a selection of maps associated with North American investment, colonization, and tourism in Cuba during the first 15 years following the Spanish American War; during this period, the United States intermittently occupied Cuba and contemplated annexing the country. Indeed, various railroad, steamship, and land companies, as well as journals such as the Cuba Review began to publish maps of Cuba. The maps emphasized how seamless and effortless travel could be to Havana and beyond. This paper will further show how these maps helped to make certain towns and scenic areas tangible to the American traveling public. Maps were often part of promotional literature leading tourists, colonists, and investors to have certain expectations of a new Cuba in which they could experience a healthy, safe, modern, land of abundance, but whose long history with Spain and long experience with multi-culturalism were either minimized or erased.

A Historical Inquiry Into Bilingual Reading Textbooks: Coloniality and Biliteracy at the Turn of the 20th Century

AbstractThe authors present an analysis of bilingual reading textbooks published at the turn of the 20th century. The authors examined the kinds of opportunities for learning offered by bilingual reading textbooks developed for students in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War. The analysis revealed challenges to understanding related to both the content and the structure of these textbooks, as well as the coloniality of knowledge embedded in them. The historical record also reveals a rejection of the format and content from scholars and educational leaders, and the subsequent turn toward reading materials, which better reflected the everyday experiences of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipinx children, albeit often monolingually rather than bilingually. Implications are offered for how contemporary literacy materials might support (bi)literacy development of bilingual students across the globe.

Ronald L. Mize, Latina/o Studies

Reviewed by: Latina/o Studies by Ronald L. Mize Kane Ferguson (bio) Ronald L. Mize, Latina/o Studies. Polity Press, 2019. Pp. 172. Part of the Short Introductions Series by Polity Press, Ronald Mize’s Latina/o Studies casts the field’s current debates against a historical accounting of its development. This monograph serves as a comprehensive guide to both students and scholars who are interested in the growth of the discipline, as well as the historical foundations that inform ongoing debates. As it is significantly easier for individuals to remain connected to a homeland in the “post-1965 migration” (8) era, a major theme of this text is transnationalism and its relationship with neoliberalism, nativism, and globalization. Divided into eight chapters, the work traces the veins of Latina/o studies from several perspectives. Chapter 1 concentrates on terminology, beginning with government deployment of the term “Hispanic” on census forms in the 1970s to the emergence of “Latino” as a shortened version of “Latinoamericano.” During the 1990s, concern over the term’s visible masculinity was voiced, and more inclusive language such as Latin@ (2000s), Latinx (2010s), and most recently, Latinidad(es), has since emerged. Through a discussion of national origin and lived experiences, Mize confronts (im)migration and transnationalism and complicates conceptualizations of a panethnic Latina/o identity. Chapter 2 chronicles the trajectory of US and Latin American history, focusing on the legacy of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism that continues to inform Latina/o studies research and scholars. This includes the US-Mexico War, the Spanish American War, and US political and military involvement in Latin American nations (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala), as well as revolutionary and proindependence figures. Similarly, the chapter describes historical immigration patterns to, and destinations within, the US and traces US political movements such as the Chicano and Boricua civil rights movements (1960s and 1970s), the sanctuary movements (1980s), and the immigrant rights movements (2000s). In chapters 3 and 4, Mize pushes back on scholarship that overrepresents Mexican American culture and thought by unpacking the complexity of Latina/o studies through a detailed account of the preceding area studies. Specifically, chapter 3 concentrates on the simultaneous but separate inauguration of Chicano studies in the Southwest and Puerto Rican studies in the Northeast, which arose amid the civil rights movement as well as in response to earlier scholarship that relied upon and perpetuated stereotypes of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. The focus of chapter 4 broadens to illustrate the “plurality of Latina/o and Latin American experiences” (59). It introduces the rise of other Latina/o area studies such as Central American studies, Cuban American studies, Dominican studies, and South American studies through theorizations of a Latino political consciousness (59). However, Mize is quick to clarify that Latina/o studies is [End Page 205] “more than simply an amalgamation of disparate national-origin groups” (59). In many ways unique to the US, there are “places where Latina/os come together in their daily lived experiences” (59), which the field of Latina/o studies now conceptualizes “as embodying Latinidades” (59). In a similar way, chapter 5 engages Latina subject positions to illustrate the expansion of identity through conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. Mize outlines scholarship aimed at “reclaiming the lost voices of Latinas” (62) in historical contexts such as representations of Doña María/La Malintzin/La Malinche and other writings that “inform our understanding of life filtered through Latina eyes” (64). In chapter 6, Mize returns to the present to concentrate on popular culture and the representation of Latina/os therein. Mize demonstrates the “conflation” (76) of Latina/o identities and stereotypical representation of Latina/o subjects in all forms of popular media as well as an imagined homogenized market segment. He then counters with an outline of the heterogenous responses put forth by Latina/o studies scholars. This chapter further explicates the political threat posed by representations like the “Latino threat narrative” (77) emerging from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and administration. Mize illustrates how state legislation is a “main expression of today’s nativism” (79), positing that “Latina/o Studies scholars have to recognize that in many ways our celebration...

1914, between two oceans, between two empires: a turning point for Latin America

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US strategic goal was to transform the Mexican Gulf and the Caribbean into an ‘American Mediterranean Sea’, to ensure its military and commercial hegemony. The opening of the interoceanic canal of Panama, which coincided with the outbreak of the Great War, promoted among Ibero-American elites the development of a new continental pan-nationalism inspired by Hispanism, in combination with an increasing and heterogeneous anti-imperialism. Concentrating on the years from 1898 to 1918, this paper will analyze the influence of those currents on Latin American intellectuals as a reaction to the transition from a traditional empire —Spain and its overseas colonies— to a new form of ‘imperialism’ embodied by the USA.

Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines

In 1898, during the Spanish–American War, the Philippines declared independence from Spain. The United States did not acknowledge this declaration, suppressed an insurrection, and imposed colonial rule until 1946. Before and after World War II, the United States maintained a singular military presence in the Philippines, concentrated in Subic Bay. In the early 1990s, the United States closed the military base. Shortly thereafter, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone was established. What should we make of this history? Did Philippine leaders and citizens welcome the US military and benefit from the jobs and commerce? Were Philippine people forced to endure an ongoing imperial presence despite open and ongoing resistance? Did US soldiers and sailors violate laws and customs with impunity? Did the military base provide stable and well-paying jobs, with unmatched opportunities for career advancement? These questions can be posed in more personal and intimate terms. Did Philippine workers resent US employers? Did US military personnel live out sexual fantasies at the expense of Filipinos? Did US soldiers fall in love with and build enduring families with Filipino lovers? What became of the children left behind by US military personnel?

The Tohono O’odham “Attack” on El Plomo: A Study in Sovereignty, Survivance, Security, and National Identity at the Dawn of the American Century

Abstract Having inhabited the Sonoran Desert since time immemorial, the Tohono O’odham had been moving their herds of cattle across the U.S-Mexico border since they began ranching. But in 1898, within the context of the Spanish-American War, their migrations and subsequent local conflicts became national news, inciting the intervention of four government agencies.

Legislating for American Empire: Territorial Policy and the House Committee on Territories

This project takes a closer look at one of the major sources of congressional territorial policy, the House Committee on Territories. Using archival resources and historical records, the article analyzes the decisions and actions of this Committee, the Committee membership, and the specific issues it handled, from its creation in 1825 until the Spanish-American War in 1898. I find that the Committee played an important role within the territorial system. Decisions it made impacted the shape and size of states, the autonomy and flexibility of territorial governments, and the regulation of federal officials within the territories. It also acted as a centralized location for concerns from territorial residents. The actions of the Committee played a substantial role in the development of the American political system, because through obstruction or acquiescence its decisions impacted the nation's expansion.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MYTH

This paper analyses the impact of the myth of España Negra on Spanish identity and culture from the country’s crushing defeat in the Spanish-American War to the present. Spain’s loss of Cuba and the Philippines (the last remnants of its once-global empire) to the United States in 1898 gave rise to a profound national crisis and provided a catalyst for a new wave of writers, artists and intellectuals known collectively as the Generation of ’98, a movement that focused on the motives for the debacle and sought the “essence” of Spain in the sobriety of the Castilian landscape and regional customs. Conservative authors of that period such as Azorin and painters such as Ignacio Zuloaga and José Gutiérrez Solana propagated a troubling, dark vision of Spain that remained unquestioned during the Franco dictatorship and has been repeatedly revived by new generations of Spanish writers, visual artists and movie directors. The España Negra myth has had a particularly strong impact on Spanish photographers, many of who have focused on archetypes and endeavoured to create a visual record of a vanishing national heritage. José Ortiz Echagüe, whose work is examined in depth in this text, served as a reference for most Spanish photographers until the end of the 1970s in terms of both style (an outdated form of pictorialism) and subjects (landscape, country and heritage viewed from an urban perspective). The notion of España Negra has evolved and waned over time. Photographers lost interest in the topic following Franco’s death and the end of his decades-long dictatorship and looked increasingly to Europe for inspiration. This paper analyses how new generations of image-makers working in radically different circumstances have ideologically and aesthetically distanced themselves from outmoded perceptions of Spain as an irredeemably backward and underdeveloped society.

Gender, Casticismo and Imperial Nations in Spain's Fin De Siècle: Blanca De Los Ríos's Sangre Española (1899)

Blanca de los Rios (1859-1956) was among a number of fin-de-siecle Spanish writers who used the context of the War of Independence (1808-14) for diverg-ing national agendas. Her little-studied novella, Sangre espanola (1899), demonstrates the inseparability of nineteenth-century constructions of the Spanish nation from its imperial identity. Like the War of Independence, the Spanish-American War (1895-98) fuelled a fear of foreign imperialism that spilled over into cultural realms, giving rise to debates on what constituted a “pure” Spanish nation and literature, as exemplified in Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casticismo (1895). I read Sangre espanola against Unamuno’s work to highlight de los Rios’s engagement with paradigms of cultural inclusion and exclusion. I posit that the novella’s displacement of fin-de-siecle concerns around Spain’s identity, national and imperial, onto the War of Independence attempts to affirm an enduring essence untouched by imperial loss. While existing studies have identified some aspects of Sangre espanola’s imbrication with empire, I address issues pertinent to both colonization and women’s subjection—resistance, consent, and contract—and the novella’s vindication of women as actors in the masculine domain of war.

From Cold-War Communist Connection to Post-Cold-War Divergence: Cuba and Ethiopia

My paper will assess the effects that decolonization and communism had on Ethiopia and Cuba during the Cold War. The lasting impacts such concepts had on both countries after the Cold War and into the present day will also be examined. It may be interesting to contemplate that both Ethiopia and Cuba were third-world countries that transitioned into communist nations during the Cold War, but, after the end of the Cold War, only Cuba kept its communist government. Ethiopia was the only non-colonized country in the continent of Africa. Instead of being controlled by outside European nations, Ethiopia was ruled by a monarch for six hundred years. However, in the 1970s, the country was weakened by political in-fighting. In order to restore public confidence and unity, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu seized power in a military coup and transformed the country into a communist state. As of today, Ethiopia has a formally democratic political system with a federal republic. On the other hand, Cuba had been colonized by the Spanish from the 15th century until the Spanish-American War in the 19th century. In 1959, its US-backed President, Fulgencio Batista, was ousted during the Cuban Revolution leaving the country in the hands of Fidel Castro. Since then, Cuba has been a one-party state under communist rule. Castro would utilize his party to exercise control over all aspects of Cuban life. Through my paper, I will research why out of these two third-world countries with similar desires to unify their nations under communism only Cuba remained a communist nation in the 21st century.

Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith

Reviewed by: Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith Andrew J. Rosa (bio) Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line. By Thomas E. Smith. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Pp. 194. $90.00 cloth; $27.95 paper) In seven well-written chapters, Thomas E. Smith considers how intellectuals of African descent navigated the global color line between the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Rather than representing a lull in the history of Pan-Africanism, as is suggested in much of the literature, Emancipation without Equality credits this period for producing a generation of intellectuals that challenged racial oppression in pursuit of equal treatment and rights in the colonies and metropoles of the Atlantic world. If Euro-American powers guided the course of imperialism, then African and African-descended people represented a formidable, anti-imperialist response. Smith begins with a discussion of Pan-African thought as represented by African American intellectuals who, despite their marginalization from the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago and the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, formed a counter-public sphere wherein they interrogated the meaning of American citizenship, condemned white vigilante terrorism, and called for greater control over the Christianizing mission in Africa. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Alexander Crummell, and Booker T. Washington are all discussed as significant in this regard, as are a number of African American women, who, like Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Julia Cooper, pressed for Black inclusion in the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women. Moving across the Atlantic in chapter two, Smith discusses the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as a culminating moment in Pan-African protest. In addition to celebrating Euro-American imperial mastery, this venue featured the "American Negro Exhibit," which ceded space to Thomas Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois to challenge the "Negro problem" school of thought by evidencing African American progress since slavery's abolition. This challenge carried over to the first Pan-African Conference in London, where diaspora intellectuals called [End Page 369] for the expansion of rights and equality across the Atlantic world. The ideas and platforms they put forward discredited the ideological underpinnings of the global color line and reflected the influence of positivist currents shaping anti-racist thought during this period. Smith expands his discussion on the Pan-African critique of Euro-American Christianity in chapter three by focusing on the ideas of religious intellectuals that corresponded with the African American journalist John E. Bruce. While supportive of the civilizationist project in Africa, men like George Washington Williams, Theophilus Scholes, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mojola Agbebi were generally critical of white-led Christianity, seeing it as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism. They instead insisted on a more forceful embrace of political reform and a commitment to vindicating Africa from "Dark Continent" stereotypes that justified the exploitation of Black bodies globally. Emphasis on the correspondence between Africa and the United States continues in chapter four with Smith's examination of the Spanish American War and the South African (Boer) War. Both events were imbued with masculinist meanings by Pan-African intellectuals and looked upon as opportunities to advance claims for rights that essentially remain unrealized. Smith returns to the World Congress of Representative Women and the Pan-African Conference in chapter five to remind readers that, despite the masculinist nature of Pan-African discourse, women, including several of whom founded the National Association of Colored Women, engaged in advocating for rights for people of African descent. From the trans-Atlantic protests of Ida. B. Wells and Catherine Impey, to the rhetorical responses of Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauline Hopkins, women spoke, wrote, theorized, and organized preambles to action against the global color line. Smith concludes his examination with an analysis of the 1911 Universal Race Congress. In addition to Boas, who is credited with shifting the discourse on race from the realm of biology to culture, the Congress is discussed as significant for announcing the arrival of the Sudanese–Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali. As founder and editor of African [End Page 370] Times and Orient...

"It Makes a Fellow Feel Responsible!": Anglo-American Imperial Vistas and "The White Man's Burden" in McClure's Magazine, 1898–99

"It Makes a Fellow Feel Responsible!"Anglo-American Imperial Vistas and "The White Man's Burden" in McClure's Magazine, 1898–99 Laura Jeffries While Rudyard Kipling's immeasurably famous poem "The White Man's Burden" generally is seen as an example of British imperial literature, looking at the material context of its publication in American periodicals also illustrates how it contributed to and mirrored American discourse about empire just after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. First published in the February 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, advertised on the cover and replacing the customary frontispiece, "The White Man's Burden" also appeared in newspapers across the United States within a few days.1 In the poem, the de facto literary voice of the British Empire, speaking directly to the American public, encouraged the United States to annex the Philippines after expelling Spain from the islands less than a year earlier.2 Kipling—a transnational figure with powerful connections in the American political and media landscape—and his poem energized this conversation while also reflecting rhetoric that was already pervasive in the U.S., and in mass-market magazines like McClure's in particular.3 The six issues of McClure's volume twelve (November 1898 to April 1899) offer a portrait of the milieu into which an influential English author and a powerful American publisher inserted this imperialist poem. As we will see, the poem and its famous author-as-cultural-symbol were very much at home in the pages of McClure's, reifying a collection of ideas about manifest destiny, Anglo-American identity, and the realities of white imperialism abroad. Examples throughout this volume of the affordable and advertisement-laden McClure's suggest a large readership that envisioned a beneficently Anglo-American and Christian global future while the nation—which had recently realized its first "manifest destiny" across much of North America—began expanding into spaces disconnected from the mainland. In this [End Page 169] paper, I sift through these unexplored primary sources, thickening our description of the poem's provenance by reconstructing the conversation of a segment of culture that participated—publishing, writing, reading—in one side of the debate over American imperial expansion.4 Combining a transnational perspective with scholarship on the cultural impacts of turn-of-the-century publishing and American Anglo-Saxonism after the rapprochement, this extended case study adds to a growing collection of inter-imperial histories of the United States and Great Britain.5 Ian Tyrrell's important work on American empire encourages the "study of the transnational spaces—mental and material—that individuals and groups created outside of nation."6 McClure's is just such a space. The selected 1898–99 volume provides a convenient boundary since the poem, the only part that has received attention so far, appeared virtually in the middle of the volume and within a week of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. Thus, volume twelve provides a partial snapshot of American culture—insofar as one magazine can portray it and convey it—at a moment that has, for so many historians, marked the beginning of US overseas imperial history. Though the significance of the McClure's magazine context for "The White Man's Burden" has not been well explored, recent discussions of how imperial literature in English was circulated and received and of Kipling's role in global opinion-making provide a critical backdrop. John Lee's 2014 article "King Demos and His Laureate" uses newspaper archives to clarify an important point for scholarship, that the poem was initially published in McClure's and a few other American newspapers on the first day of February, several days before it was reprinted in England.7 Lee is concerned with Kipling's calculated use of the newspaper poem as a transatlantic medium, but his discussion of the magazine's national reach and enormous circulation of about 369,000 copies—as well as his use of recent biographical scholarship to discuss Kipling's presence in America—help to establish the poem's influence in American culture and its essentially American identity.8 For my purposes, this matters because McClure's is so often mentioned as a secondary...

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Reviewed by: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin Mark A. Goldberg The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. By Greg Grandin. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019. Pp. 370. Sources, notes, index.) In this sweeping book, historian Greg Grandin demonstrates the power, influence, and transformation of the frontier myth in the history of the United States. Writing for a popular audience, Grandin argues that President Trump's border wall signifies the true closing of the frontier, or the "promise of boundlessness" (7), more than one hundred years after Frederick Jackson Turner first declared the frontier closed. Instead of a reckoning with America's imagined limitlessness and its harmful impact on democracy, equity, the environment, and countless human bodies, Trump's acknowledgment of limits embraces domination, targeting those same victims of this once powerful myth. The End of the Myth covers three centuries of American history, beginning in colonial America with the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763. For colonists, the boundary separating Native and British territories hindered their ability to achieve individual independence through agriculture and land ownership. This was not the first time Euro-American settlers invaded Native lands; however, such acquisition solidified the notion that expansion would solve America's problems. In the post-independence era, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison advocated a westward-looking empire of liberty and extensions of the sphere, respectively, as ways to achieve "true" American democracy and freedom. As the United States industrialized in the nineteenth century, Americans saw the West as the [End Page 374] solution for all obstacles to progress, at least progress for ordinary white men, built on the backs of women, Native peoples, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans. Slave owners removed Indians and instituted a growing cotton industry while paying little attention to a growing sectional crisis, and militias and military men achieved their masculinist dreams through violent expansion. Then came Turner and the so-called closing of the frontier, which introduced a new reading of limitlessness. In his 1893 speech, Turner solidified Anglo westward expansion as the essence of American democracy. The way to achieve progress and build America would now expand beyond its geopolitical borders. In 1898, three decades after the Civil War, northern and southern soldiers worked together to "save" the Caribbean and Philippines from Spanish tyranny. Yet white soldiers, reveling in the havoc they wreaked on people of color on the islands, employed violence against fellow African American military men. Frontiers also produced fear, which has continued to the present day. Early twentieth-century white nativists mapped their anxieties about a closed frontier onto U.S. borders and influenced the creation of the Border Patrol and immigration quotas. Americans viewed World War II, the New Deal, and the Cold War through a frontier lens, and the brutality of Vietnam built on the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and Spanish-American War as "another frontier war" (201). While Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists used the frontier myth to push alternative visions of America predicated on civil rights and antiwar critique, the Right advocated "the right to limitlessness," most markedly characterized by Ronald Reagan (214). Boundless U.S. interventions abroad and global trade in the late twentieth century helped restructure North American economies to benefit the few, leaving the many without living wages and, in many cases, a place to call home. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent collapse of the economy once again transformed discussions of the frontier, and Americans responded with fear to what they perceived as chaos. By the election of President Obama, the frontier myth's safety valve had disappeared, giving rise to Trump and his wall, a symbol that "no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism" (275). The End of the Myth is an excellent intellectual history of the enduring frontier myth. It accessibly reframes the significance of U.S. expansion and adeptly ties the distant and recent pasts to the present day. Students of history as well as audiences interested...

A Historical Examination of Military Records of US Army Suicide, 1819 to 2017

Suicide rates among active-duty personnel in the US military have increased substantially since 2004, and numerous studies have attempted to contextualize and better understand this phenomenon. Placing contemporary examinations of suicides among active-duty personnel in the US Army in historical context provides opportunities for joint historical and epidemiological research to inform health care professionals and policy makers. To consolidate data on suicide rates among active-duty personnel in the US Army as far back as historical records allow and to identify historical trends to separate them from more acute causal factors. This cross-sectional study included all active-duty service members in the US Army from 1819 to 2017 as identified and detailed in US government publications, studies, and journal articles. Empirical data were extracted from US government publications and journal articles published from 1819 to 2017. Data collection and analysis were completed between July and August of 2019. Suicide. Suicide rates per 100 000 individuals. Starting in 1843, the overall trend in annual suicide rates among active-duty service members in the US Army increased, with a peak rate of 118.3 per 100 000 in 1883. From that historical high point, the rate decreased in 3 successive waves, each corresponding to the end of the following wars: the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945). The latter had the historically lowest rate of 5 per 100 000 in 1944 to 1945. During the Cold War (approximately 1945-1991), the rate generally stabilized in the low teens to midteens (ie, 10-15 per 100 000). The rate increased again during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, increasing to 29.7 per 100 000 in 2012. From 2008 to present, the annual rate has remained within the range of 20.2 to 29.7 per 100 000. This study represents the most extensive historical examination of suicides in the US Army to date. By taking a long-term historical approach to suicide among active-duty personnel in the US Army, this study affords future researchers a new analytical tool and an additional perspective from which to better differentiate long-term and historical trends from more short-term and temporary causal factors.

Epidemiological Isolation as an Infection Mortality Risk Factor in U.S. Soldiers from Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries.

It remains uncertain why most infectious disease mortalities disappeared before modern medical interventions. Historical epidemiology using prospectively collected U.S. Army data from the Civil War (1860-1861), Spanish-American War (1898-1899), and First World War (1917-1918) suggests that epidemiological isolation was a major mortality risk factor for soldiers. Morbidity and mortality due to common infections decreased progressively from 1860 to 1918, except for influenza during the 1918 pandemic. Adult measles or mumps infections are indicative of isolated rural populations and correlated with disease mortality by U.S. state. Experiencing infections before adulthood may equip the immune system to better resist infections and decrease mortality rates.

Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, by Heather D. Curtis

In Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, Heather D. Curtis calls attention to the oft-overlooked influence of the Christian Herald, an evangelical newspaper popular during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in developing the human-itarian ideal within American cultural identity, religious practice, and political outlook. Although the paper “ceased publication . . . in 1992,” the association bearing its name continues to this day, supporting numerous charities, including the renowned Bowery Mission in New York City (276). Throughout Holy Humanitarians, Curtis weaves the little-known story of how the newspaper’s editors, Louis Klopsch and Thomas De Witt Talmage, employed creative advertising tactics to raise both awareness and funds for disaster relief around the world, as well as at home in the United States. “Couch[ing] their entreaties in explicitly theological terms,” they sought to cast a vision of humanitarian aid as a key aspect of evangelical faithfulness and of “American destiny” (12, 33, 86). Curtis makes a conscious and largely successful effort to present her archival findings in such a way that amplifies the roles and voices of groups and individuals on the societal and historiographical margins.To a certain extent, Klopsch himself falls into this category, as a former juvenile delinquent “who had been forced to quit school at an early age to help support his struggling immigrant family.” Curtis opines that it is in part Klopsch’s personal experience with the criminal justice system that fuels his compassion for those oppressed and suffering (18). As towering a figure as Klopsch appears in this book, Curtis stops just short of crossing into the territory of “great man theory.” Undeniably the protagonist of the book, Klopsch nevertheless finds a formidable sparring partner in Red Cross leader Clara Barton, as the two organizations vied for recognition as “the nation’s primary instrument for the collection and delivery of international aid” (100, 219).Klopsch’s story, a counternarrative of the history of American historiography of humanitarianism that lays responsibility for large-scale generosity at the feet of a few multimillionaires and secular relief organizations (5), is itself challenged by yet another counternarrative—that told by Indian revivalist Pandita Ramabai, who rejects the overly simplistic storyline in which American evangelicals heroically rush to the aid of helpless Indians suffering from famine. Ramabai, while appreciative of Klopsch’s efforts on her behalf, wants the world to remember the agency of Indians, including “former famine sufferers,” in rallying to support their own compatriots (166).Women and minorities appear in the book not only as antagonists to Klopsch and the Christian Herald, but also as partners in mission. Klopsch so admired Emma J. Wilson, an African American woman who founded a school for black children in North Carolina, that he served as treasurer of her school’s board and praised her strategy as one that empowered black Americans to help themselves (197). Holy Humanitarians is exemplary in demonstrating how World Christianity can serve as a historiographical approach that highlights the experiences of those whose stories the dominant Western narrative has sought to silence or obscure.Curtis dedicates a significant portion of the book to exploring the ways in which Klopsch and the Christian Herald as an organization failed to live up to their own ideals, especially in response to major shifts in American politics and culture. The first such shift corresponded to the government’s abandonment of noninterventionism during the Spanish-American War period and its acquisition of imperial territories. Resultantly, the Christian Herald, which had previously promoted pacifism, suddenly began portraying war itself as a potential channel for humanitarian aid (86). The second entailed the newspaper’s eventual reticence concerning controversial issues of the time—including injustice toward immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans—due to the editors’ desire to unite their readership in the midst of rampant political division, so as to enable “evangelicals to maintain their position as arbiters of American culture, shapers of the nation’s destiny, and premier providers of humanitarian aid” (211–12).This timely book is at once winsome and subversively political. Just as Arthur Miller ostensibly portrays the barbarism of the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century in his classic play The Crucible, while actually constituting an allegorical protest against the eerily reminiscent finger-pointing of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, so Holy Humanitarians depicts American evangelicalism’s twentieth-century moral struggle with matters of race, immigration, and imperialism in a way that unabashedly evokes the continuation of this struggle to the present day. This book is poised to benefit scholars and students of American history, history of Christianity, media studies, and World Christianity.

Samuel Llano, Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850-1930

In this book, Samuel Llano takes the reader on a journey to Madrid in a period of intense transformation. Between 1850 and 1930, Spain went through political, social, and musical change. The defeat in the Spanish-American war dealt a severe blow to the nation’s self-assurance and a sense of decadence permeated society. Nevertheless, it was a time of urban expansion, and planning played a key role in building the modern city. Paris and London have been taken as examples of how urban planning, ...

Bearing the White Man’s Burden: American Empire and the Origin of Public Administration

AbstractThere is an overlooked chapter in the history of American public administration: the experiment with colonial administration in the two decades following the Spanish-American War. Several scholars now identified as pioneers of American public administration were actively engaged in this project. They studied European empires closely to determine how the new American dependencies should be governed. This work was guided by beliefs about racial superiority and the duty of civilized nations to improve uncivilized peoples through colonization. This episode of administrative history provides insight into how American academics thought about race and public administration in the early decades of the twentieth century, both overseas and within the United States. It compels a reassessment of our understandings about their commitment to democracy, and about the supposed differences between American and European public administration at that time.

DAMN GREAT EMPIRES! WILLIAM JAMES AND THE POLITICS OF PRAGMATISM BY ALEXANDER LIVINGSTON

Reviewed by: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism by Alexander Livingston Shannon Sullivan Alexander Livingston Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 264 pp. I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually [End Page 209] synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. (To be fair, I’d say the same thing about other classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce.) I’m not alone in thinking and feeling this way. Cornel West (1989: 60), for example, once claimed that “James was preoccupied with the state of his and others’ souls, not the social conditions of their lives…. In regard to politics, James has nothing profound or even provocative to say.” Even James himself claimed in 1899 that his “political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly not to the past or present” (epigram in Livingston 2016). For all I knew before reading Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (2016), the “damn” in Alexander Livingston’s title might have been an adjective rather than a verb, conveying James’s enthusiasm for rather than his condemnation of large imperial nations. But a verb it is, and with an exclamation mark from James to boot. Livingston’s remarkably refreshing book has written a new chapter in the story of what pragmatism has to contribute to political philosophy, and it has changed my thinking about the value of James’s philosophy for political purposes. As important as the concept of democracy is, it is not the only or the final word on how pragmatists might approach political theory and action. James’s contribution is not merely to insert individuality into democracy (cf. Rondel 2017), a reading of James that has value but which still seems to assume that the topic of democracy exhausts his political insights. On Livingston’s account, James instead provides an anti-imperialist critique of modern nations that is shaped by its “anarchist edges” (George Cotkin, quoted in Livingston 2016: 9). Rather than a full-blown Anarchist (capital “A”) ideology, what we find in James is an anarchist (lowercase “a”) criticism of what he called “bigness,” which led him to oppose empire building. Eloquently elaborated by Livingston and read with an “anarchist squint” (Scott 2012), James’s political vision becomes both apparent and appealing. James’s political philosophy is found primarily in his Nachlass, the notes, letters, and editorials that James wrote especially in the last ten years of his life (from 1899–1900). These were the years after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which as Livingston argues (2016: 2), triggered a kind of political awakening for James. While James has been understood variously—and somewhat inconsistently—as “an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan democrat” (2016: 7), Livingston convincingly demonstrates that James instead should be considered an anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist thinker. In Livingston’s view, James’s most significant contribution to pragmatist political philosophy is to “reorient[t] political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life” (2016: 7, emphasis in original). [End Page 210] Chapter 1 of Damn Great Empires! demonstrates how James’s former student, Ralph Barton Perry, significantly shaped the reception of James’s political thought. Perry was a liberal who advocated individualism, toleration, and democracy, and he used James’s philosophy to advance American liberalism in the twentieth-century era of the two World Wars. In doing so, Perry was combatting an emerging interpretation of James’s philosophy as proto-fascist. In the 1920s, James’s pragmatism became aligned with the anti-intellectualism in Europe that fed into Italian fascism. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini even infamously claimed...

The Conundrum of American Power in the Age of World War I

Reports of the rise of the United States to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world's reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked the basic attributes of a great power, such as economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, which was a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.