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

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.

Author: Joe Jackson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 10/14/2025
Pages: 816
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.01lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.31w x 1.82d
ISBN: 9780374191900


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 09/01/2025 pg. 11
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2025
Publishers Weekly 08/18/2025

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.