Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

by Joe Jackson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374718404
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	816

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.
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 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.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2025-06-13
A searching account of the Spanish-American War, which made Spain’s empire America’s.

Jackson, an accomplished historian and journalist, begins his long, richly detailed narrative with Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, who was in Havana investigating conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government had herded into concentration camps, with an estimated 425,000 dead of disease and starvation. While she was there, the American warshipMaine blew up in Havana’s harbor, providing the pretext for an American invasion. As Jackson writes, the Cuban campaign inaugurated the United States as a Pacific power “and created beliefs that America was a stern yet benevolent country tasked by Destiny to enforce peace and bring prosperity to the world.” That comforting thought was soon disproven, especially in the Philippines, whose people discovered that they had merely substituted one colonial power for another and then endured a vicious war that saw an estimated 600,000 Filipino deaths. Whereas the Cuban campaign brought glory to Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, “the Philippine War would be America’s most quickly forgotten war, the one least celebrated in song or legend, the one least memorialized.” And for good reason, Jackson recounts: American soldiers committed countless atrocities while being felled right and left by disease and starvation themselves; many soldiers committed suicide, and others deserted to join Filipino rebels, while the American leadership attempted to control the news—unsuccessfully, as it turns out, although one senior officer said to a reporter, “If you should hear of a few Filipinos more or less being put out of the way, don’t grow too sentimental over it.” 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.

Kirkus Reviews