In 1898: The Birth of the American Century, David Traxel tells the story of a watershed year, a year of foreign conflict, extravagant adventure, and breakneck social change that forged a new America—a sudden empire with many far-flung possessions, a dynamic new player upon the global stage. At the heart of this vivid, anecdotal history is a masterly account of the Spanish-American War, the "splendid little war" that garnered the nation Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. From the sinking of the Maine in waters off Havana to Teddy Roosevelt's rough riders and the triumph of Admiral Dewey, here is the lightning-swift military episode that transformed America into a world power. Here too are many stories not so often told—the bloody first successes of the new United Mine Workers, the tentative beginnings of the Ford Motor Company, the million-dollar launch of the Uneeda Biscuit—each in its way as important as the harbinger of the American century. Compulsively readable, frequently humorous, utterly fascinating in its every detail, 1898 is popular history at its finest.

A century after the Cuban war for independence was fought, Louis Pérez examines the meaning of the war of 1898 as represented in one hundred years of American historical writing. Offering both a critique of the conventional historiography and an alternate

Labelled a 'splendid little war' by Senator John Hay, the Spanish American War was a peculiar event in America's history, provoked as much by the press as by political pressures. Here, aided by superbly detailed maps and artwork, the author deals with the clashes at Las Guasimas and El Caney, the capture of San Juan Hill, and the naval battle and siege of Santiago. The war was to mark the end of Spanish sovereignty in her 'New World', and the establishment of the United States of America as a world power.

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

These 13 short stories by 5 authors of the era include 4 tales by Miguel de Unamuno along with the works of Valle-Inclán, Blasco Ibánez, Baroja, and "Azorín" (José Martínez Ruiz).

From 1895 to 1898, Cuban insurgents fought to free their homeland from Spanish rule. Though often overshadowed by the "Splendid Little War" of the Americans in 1898, according to John Tone, the longer Spanish-Cuban conflict was in fact more remarkable, foreshadowing the wars of decolonization in the twentieth century. Employing newly released evidence--including hospital records, intercepted Cuban letters, battle diaries from both sides, and Spanish administrative records--Tone offers new answers to old questions concerning the war. He examines the origin of Spain's genocidal policy of "reconcentration"; the causes of Spain's military difficulties; the condition, effectiveness, and popularity of the Cuban insurgency; the necessity of American intervention; and Spain's supposed foreknowledge of defeat. The Spanish-Cuban-American war proved pivotal in the histories of all three countries involved. Tone's fresh analysis will provoke new discussions and debates among historians and human rights scholars as they reexamine the war in which the concentration camp was invented, Cuba was born, Spain lost its empire, and America gained an overseas empire.

The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 celebrated Omaha’s key economic role as a center of industry west of the Mississippi River and its arrival as a progressive metropolis after the Panic of 1893. The exposition also promoted the rise of the United States as an imperial power, at the time on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and the nation’s place in bringing “civilization” to Indigenous populations both overseas and at the conclusion of the recent Plains Indian Wars. The Omaha World’s Fair, however, is one of the least studied American expositions. Wendy Jean Katz brings together leading scholars to better understand the event’s place in the larger history of both Victorian-era America and the American West. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume cover an array of topics, from competing commercial visions of the cities of the Great West; to the role of women in the promotion of City Beautiful ideals of public art and urban planning; and the constructions of Indigenous and national identities through exhibition, display, and popular culture. Leading scholars T. J. Boisseau, Bonnie M. Miller, Sarah J. Moore, Nancy Parezo, Akim Reinhardt, and Robert Rydell, among others, discuss this often-misunderstood world’s fair and its place in the Victorian-era ascension of the United States as a world power.