Unexceptional Conquests: 1898 and the Construction of America's Imperial Identity

Leading scholars of American empire examine the construction of American imperial identity at the tail end of the nineteenth century. The War of 1898-also known as the Spanish-American War-was a pivotal moment in American history, in which the United States initiated an ostensibly humanitarian war against Spain in April yet emerged eight months later with a colonial empire over the people it claimed to rescue.This was immediately followed by the Philippine-American War, an ugly conflict in which the United States brutally suppressed Filipino nationalists who resisted American colonization.While historians have recognized the colonial ambitions of the United States throughout its early history, the events of 1898 highlighted, in stark clarity, the tension between the nation's exceptionalist claims to moral superiority and its highly unexceptional ambitions for imperial domination. Unexceptional Conquests gathers some of the foremost scholars of the Gilded Age and American empire to exam