Fire and Empire

Here's a description for Fire and Empire:In the summer of 1898, the United States fought and won a war that changed everything. In fewer than four months, American forces destroyed two Spanish fleets, invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico, and seized an archipelago in the Pacific — emerging from the conflict as a global imperial power with territories spanning two oceans. Fire and Empire: A Military History of the Spanish-American War traces the full arc of that transformation, from the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor to the opening shots of the Philippine-American War. Across sixteen battles and ten chapters, this book examines how men fought and why commanders made the decisions they did — at Manila Bay, on the blood-soaked ridges above Santiago, in the swift campaign across Puerto Rico, and in the streets of Manila where American soldiers blocked Filipino fighters from entering their own capital city. It is a story of extraordinary courage and catastrophic mismanagement, of democratic idealism and imperial appetite, of a nation that set out to liberate Cuba and ended up ruling the Philippines. The Spanish-American War is often dismissed as a footnote — a brief, easy conflict sandwiched between the Civil War and the World Wars. Fire and Empire argues otherwise.