Splendid Liberators - by Joe Jackson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 won an empire, and--many allege--lost its soul. In Splendid Liberators, Joe Jackson offers an epic narrative of the Spanish-American War, the world-spanning conflict during which the United States freed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish control only to confront resistance and resentment. The acclaimed author of Black Elk, Jackson brings the times to full, teeming life via portraits of the many leading characters--from the impetuous warrior Teddy Roosevelt, the prophetic Cuban revolutionary José Martí, and the Philippines' dignified first president, Emilio Aguinaldo, to the Red Cross's Clara Barton and the foe of empire Mark Twain. He ranges from the heroic theaters of San Juan Hill and Manila Bay to disease-wracked camps in Florida and Cuba where soldiers died en masse and to the White House and halls of Congress, where America's leaders overcame enduring reluctances to seize an overseas dominion. He also follows the exploits of the legendary African American soldier David Fagen, who joined the rebels of the Philippines and fought his compatriots, and the swashbuckling Colonel Fred Funston, who was dispatched into the jungle to hunt him down.

Overturning familiar scripts, Splendid Liberators is the first work of narrative nonfiction to look at this far-flung war through American, Cuban, and Filipino eyes, and to gauge the consequences and costs of America's first major imperial adventure.

Review Quotes

"In this exhaustively researched history, Jackson contends that the Spanish-American War of 1898 shaped the United States into an imperialist power much like the "European empires it disparaged." --The New Yorker

"Compelling, thoroughly researched . . . The Spanish-American War remains perhaps the most misunderstood conflict in U.S. history . . . Jackson has mastered the material and offers a persuasive interpretation of it . . . the author of an award-winning biography of the Lakota holy man Black Elk has done a service in uniting the two phases of the conflict into a single, engrossing narrative . . . [he] writes with a sense of urgency about the need for Americans to examine the ease with which their country gets involved in faraway wars, especially at a time when jingoism is once more on the rise." --Clay Risen, The New York Times

"Joe Jackson takes us to our greatest and most consequential 'forgotten war' and to the precise moment, fraught with moral ambiguity, when America became an empire. This is a big book full of correspondingly big personalities, ideas, and currents of history. Splendid Liberators is narrative nonfiction at its very best--intelligent, propulsive, and somehow both intimate and panoramic in scope. Americans should read it to understand how we became a world colonial power and how, in many senses, we lost our way." --Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and The Wide Wide Sea

"The 'splendid little war' of 1898 was neither splendid nor little, it turns out. Stripping away the gauzy myth, Joe Jackson has produced a devastating work of history: replete with fresh detail and brutally honest about what 'liberating' Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines really meant." --Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire

About the Author

Joe Jackson is the author of numerous books, including The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, one of Time's Top Ten Books of 2008, and Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic. His last book, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, was the winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, and the Western Writers of America's Spur Award, and was named best biography of 2016 by True West magazine. A former investigative journalist, he holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.