Splendid Liberators

“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

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, 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.

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