Splendid Liberators - by Joe Jackson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A new history of the Spanish-American War, spanning the US adventures and misadventures in Cuba and the Philippines, and paying particular attention to unsung characters such as Frederick Funston and David Fagen"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2025

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.

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

"[A fascinating read] . . . Splendid Liberators is a social and cultural history as much as it is a military history . . . that serves as an indispensable resource for those who wish to study what Jackson says became "the template for every American 'small war' in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" . . . Jackson's writing is clear and crisp and consistently results in works that, as here, are excellent examples of what narrative nonfiction should be. . . One finishes Splendid Liberators with an appreciation for how vast the panorama of history can be and admiration for individual feats of heroism on all sides. But one also wishes that U.S. political and military leaders had been more wise during these conflicts--and that their successors had studied the wars in Cuba and the Philippines more closely and learned more from them."
--Timothy J. Lockhart, The Virginian-Pilot

"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 eight previous 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, won 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 the 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.