Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Politics & government

SPENDID LIBERATORS

Joe Jackson

Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

A new history of the Spanish-American War, this immersive epic reveals the hidden origins of the American empire and the lives of those who resisted it.

Historian Joe Jackson offers an epic narrative of the Spanish-American Warthe world-spanning conflict during which the United States freed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish control only to confront resistance and resentment. Jackson brings the times to full, teeming life via portraits of their many leading charactersfrom the impetuous warrior Teddy Roosevelt, the prophetic Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, 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 yellow-fever-wracked camps in Florida 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 Donald Fagan, who joined the rebels of the Philippines, and fought his compatriotsand the swashbuckling Colonel Fred Funston, who was dispatched into the jungle to hunt him down.
Overturning familiar scripts, 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.

Joe Jackson is author of eight previous books, including The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, one of Time magazine'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 Award, 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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Book Published 2025-10-14 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

A searching account of the Spanish-American War, which made Spain's empire America's.Those who are today insisting on American exceptionalism and attempting to whitewash history will no doubt be angered by Jackson's revelations and his somber conclusion that 'U.S. history is haunted by a ruthlessness often shackled to professed idealism.' A splendid book, if centered on one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

The epic stories of little-remembered rebels against imperialism are resurfaced in this sweeping saga of the Spanish American War from journalist Jackson...Drawing on records he collected in both countries, Jackson spotlights fascinating episodes of resistance...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.'

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 bestintelligent, 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.

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.