Throughout the late nineteenth century, Cubans and Filipinos led calls for independence against Spanish colonial rule. In 1898 the United States entered the conflict under the guise of supporting liberty and democracy abroad, declaring war on Spain. The Treaty of Paris of 1898, which ended the war as well as Spanish colonial rule, resulted in the U.S. acquisition of territories off its coasts. This microsyllabus, “1898 and Its Aftermath: America’s Imperial Influence,” collects articles that use the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War as a jumping-off point to understand how issues such as labor, citizenship, weather, and sports were impacted by America’s racism and white supremacy across the globe.

“1898 and Its Aftermath: America’s Imperial Influence” represents a wide-ranging set of historical interventions on the historiography of U.S. imperialism in places impacted by 1898 and its aftermath. From the shifting legal status of citizenship for Puerto Ricans to weather reports and its impact on agriculture in Cuba, these articles underscore how and why the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898 and its aftermath is a critical moment on which to pause and reflect on issues of racism, white supremacy, and American exceptionalism. Articles by Pietruska, Ventura, and Rouleau show how people, technology, and novels created knowledge infrastructures that served the U.S. imperial project. As Rouleau writes, “Empires need stories as much as they need guns” (480). But empires also need labor. Labor, migration, and citizenship are all critical themes in the articles by Erman, McGreevey, Greene, Zeiler, and Giovannetti-Torress. Each of these articles and books utilize different entry points into the Spanish-Cuban-American War and its impacts across the globe, but all stay focused on a critique of Anglo-Saxonism, U.S. imperialism, and empire building at the turn of the twentieth century.

The making of this microsyllabus also revealed considerable gaps in GAPE scholarship. Additional work on the Philippine-American War, the annexation of Hawai’i, and the occupation of Haiti as well as closer analysis of the direct relationships between the U.S.’ imperial reach and its accumulation of capital, its solidification of racial hierarchies, and its continual atrocities at home and abroad will provide a more robust understanding of the imperial reach of the United States.

In Almost Citizens, Sam Erman tells the story of how Puerto Rico became part of the United States’ territorial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. He explores the shift from what he terms the Reconstruction Constitution—that is, the constitution in the second half of the nineteenth century that determined rights and citizenship to those before not granted these privileges, therefore, opening up citizenship—to the notion of territorial non-incorporation—which limited and made ambiguous notions of citizenship. Looking at how legal cases, judges, presidents, and Puerto Ricans debated how Puerto Rico would be incorporated into the United States, if at all, he follows the debates about whether or not Puerto Ricans would be granted U.S. citizenship.

In Black British Migrants in Cuba, Jorge Giovannetti-Torres writes about how Black British Caribbean migrants who traveled to the independent nation of Cuba post 1898 experienced social, political, and economic strife. The United States’ military intervention in Cuba in the aftermath of 1898 gave way to foreign investors and corporations, which led to the creation of sugar plantations and the encouragement of an influx of foreign labor. His focus of intra-Caribbean migration into Cuba is crucial for understating how particularly Black laboring migrants from the British Antilleans negotiated differing treatment dependent on their island of origin. Giovannetti-Torress does a fantastic job at situating the history of Afro Caribbean labor within the historical context of both nineteenth-century independence movements amidst increasing miedo negro (“black fear”) and the unstable political context in twentieth-century Cuba. “[Black British Antillean’s] presence on Cuban soil raised concerns among those who envisioned Cuba as a White Hispanic nation” writes Giovannetti-Torress (11). Black British Migrants in Cuba maintains a strong critique of how Blackness was used as a scapegoat for various state instabilities and, further, how Afro Caribbean migrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and Eastern Caribbean islands facilitated commonalities amongst the African diaspora.

In “Moveable Empire,” Julie Greene argues that the movement and mobility of labor, and especially racialized labor, was foundational to the expansion of U.S. empire. The U.S. empire was malleable, she explains, and able to move to other places for different missions quickly and efficiently. The parallel global movement of labor ensured that these missions could be carried out. By exploring the stories of Afro Caribbean laborers in Panama and white U.S. military personnel in the Philippine-American War, Greene reveals how labor, race, and class functioned across the empire. While she tells a story of U.S. global empire at work, she more importantly highlights how workers also utilized mobility to advocate for themselves, pursue economic mobility, and ensure security. In this way, “migration became a terrain of struggle between workers and government officials” (4).

Puerto Rican migration and citizenship has largely been at the discretion of the United States, but, as McGreevy shows, Puerto Ricans have consistently challenged the legal boundaries and categorizations of citizenship. McGreevey incisively focuses on the contradiction between the denial of Puerto Rican migration to the continental U.S. and Puerto Rican ports, and thus movement of goods, being considered within U.S. domestic shipping channels. The United States wanted the benefits of the Puerto Rican economy but not Puerto Rican people. Examining legal cases over the “foreign” or “domestic” status of Puerto Ricans culminated in Gonzalez v. Williams (1904), which defined a new legal category in the form of a “U.S. National”—a category in between citizen and alien.

By exploring the history of the U.S. Weather Bureau’s West Indian weather service at the turn of the century, Pietruska offers an example of the mutually constitutive relationship between government science and American empire in “Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital.” As the United States began its military occupation of Cuba in 1899, the Weather Bureau also thought itself the architects of a new imperial meteorological infrastructure by building stations in various locales throughout the West Indies. Beginning as a military endeavor to protect naval vessels from harmful weather, the expansion of American meteorological infrastructure quickly became a database for U.S. agricultural investors. Through mapping, collecting climatological data, and crop reporting, the West Indies agricultural harvests were predicted, operationalized for commercial growth, and entered into the global commodity exchange in the United States. Imperialism, Pietruska shows, was not simply militaristic or economic, but also dependent on knowledge infrastructures that, withheld, could have disastrous possibilities on the lives, livelihoods, and economies of the West Indies.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American youth series fiction reproduced notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, dichotomies of civilized and uncivilized peoples, and manliness, all largely dependent on global racial hierarchies and anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, Brian Rouleau shows in “Childhood’s Imperial Imagination.” This “repetition of racial dogma and patriotic slogans” “inculcated [boys] with a sense of personal and national superiority in the project of American aggrandizement” (510). American boys could imagine themselves in the act of conquest. As Rouleau writes, “Juvenile literature shaped and reinforced the shared mental images of empire entertained by the nation’s boyhood” (487). Youth fictional novels aimed at boys during, and in the aftermath of, 1898 solidified the continuation of ideologies about the benevolence of U.S. influence abroad for decades.

In “‘I am Already Annexed,’” Theresa Ventura tells the story of how Roman Reyes Lala, a Manila-born author who migrated to the United States and became a citizen just before 1898, fashioned himself into a public intellectual in pursuits to recast the perception of an entire archipelago. Through his writings, Lala encouraged U.S. annexation of the Philippines and by the turn of the century became known as an authority on the history of the islands and a patronage of the Republican Party. Lala offered himself as proof that a civilized Filipino was possible, and thus capable of achieving U.S. citizenship; however, his Republican supporters offered him to the public as “evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilizational potential shorn of citizenship” (428). Ventura defines this as an “embodied contradiction” that Lala held within himself. A contradiction dependent on commerce as a medium of colonial knowledge—gaining riches and notoriety in exchange for his American imperial boosterism. While Lala’s career goals to move from authors to administrator were never realized when he was denied an appointment to the Philippine Commission, his writings were heavily pulled on to justify the expansion of the American empire in the aftermath of 1898.

In “Basepaths to Empire,” Thomas Zeiler shows how the Spalding world baseball tour of 1888–1889 “implanted rationales for racism to be exploited by later imperial practices” (206). As they traveled, white baseball tourists’ language and treatment of racialized peoples and cultures contrasted sharply with their claims of Anglo-Saxon “civilization.” For example, the players attempted to throw baseballs over the Egyptian Great Sphinx of Giza and punch the sculpture in its eye. Spalding later excused these acts as “mere fun” (203). However, as Zeiler argues, players’ actions abroad reflected American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. The Spalding tour represented and maintained American ideas about racial hierarchies, exported these hierarchies overseas, and “projected the mindset of American imperialism” in the decade before the Spanish-Cuban-American War.