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

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.