The “American century” began with the Spanish-American War. In that conflict’s aftermath, the United States claimed the Philippines in its bid for world power. Before the ink on the treaty with Spain had dried, the war in the Philippines turned into a violent rebellion. After two years of fighting, U.S. forces launched an audacious mission to capture Philippine president and rebel commander-in-chief Emilio Aguinaldo. Using an elaborate ruse, U.S. Army legend Frederick “Fighting Fred” Funston orchestrated Aguinaldo’s seizure in 1901. Capturing Aguinaldo is the story of Funston, his gambit to catch Emilio Aguinaldo, and the United States’ conflicted rise to power in the early twentieth century. The United States’ war with Spain in 1898 had been quick and, for the Americans in the Philippines, virtually bloodless. But by early 1899, Filipino nationalists, who had been fighting the Spaniards for three years and expected Spain’s defeat to produce their independence, were fighting a new imperial power: the United States. The Filipinos eventually abandoned conventional warfare, switching to guerilla tactics in an ongoing conflict rife with atrocities on both sides. By March 1901, the United States was looking for a bold strike against the nationalists. Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who had already earned a Medal of Honor, and four other officers posing as prisoners were escorted by loyal Filipino soldiers impersonating rebels. After a ninety-mile forced march, the fake insurgents were welcomed into the enemy’s headquarters where, after a brief firefight, they captured President Aguinaldo. At long last, the rebellion neared collapse. More than a swashbuckling tale, Capturing Aguinaldo is a character study of Frederick Funston and Emilio Aguinaldo and a look at the United States’ rise to global power as it unfolded at ground level. It tells the thrilling but nearly forgotten story of this daring operation and its polarizing aftermath, highlighting themes of U.S. history that have reverberated for more than a century, through World War II to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Unlike other conventional histories, the unifying thread of A History of the Philippines is the struggle of the peoples themselves against various forms of oppression, from Spanish conquest and colonization to U.S. imperialism. Constantino provides a penetrating analysis of the productive relations and class structure in the Philippines, and how these have shaped―and been shaped by―the role of the Filipino people in the making of their own history. Additionally, he challenges the dominant views of Spanish and U.S. historians by exposing the myths and prejudices propagated in their work, and, in doing so, makes a major breakthrough toward intellectual decolonization. This book is an indispensible key to the history of conquest and resistance in the Philippine.

This book tells the story of the last sword ever designed by a major power for its army to use as a weapon, not as an article of a dress uniform. The sword was the U.S. Model 1913 Cavalry Saber; the designer was George S. Patton, then a lieutenant on the staff of the Army chief of staff. Patton participated in the modern pentathlon in Stockholm in 1912, which included fencing, coming fifth overall. No one in the U.S. Army could be better suited, therefore, to design its last major edged weapon. The Last Sword provides an illustrated overview of the history of cavalry swords and their employment on the battlefield from the end of the Renaissance, through the Napoleonic Era, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, culminating with the Patton cavalry saber, and includes descriptions of a number of the more famous cavalry charges. Patton’s unswerving belief in the value of horse-mounted cavalry, and in the value of those troopers and officers being equipped with the sword he designed, is described using his own words. He continued to advocate horse-mounted cavalry right up to the start of the Second World War. Though mechanized squadrons replaced the conventional cavalry, it was not quite the end of Patton’s sword as some Model 1913 Cavalry Sabers were converted to fighting knives carried by GIs during the war. The book is fully illustrated with images from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, the General George S. Patton Museum, the National Museum of the U.S. Army, the Connecticut Historical Society, and from private collections, most of which have never been published before.

The bestselling author of Overthrow and The Brothers brings to life the forgotten political debate that set America’s interventionist course in the world for the twentieth century and beyond. How should the United States act in the world? Americans cannot decide. Sometimes we burn with righteous anger, launching foreign wars and deposing governments. Then we retreat—until the cycle begins again. No matter how often we debate this question, none of what we say is original. Every argument is a pale shadow of the first and greatest debate, which erupted more than a century ago. Its themes resurface every time Americans argue whether to intervene in a foreign country. Revealing a piece of forgotten history, Stephen Kinzer transports us to the dawn of the twentieth century, when the United States first found itself with the chance to dominate faraway lands. That prospect thrilled some Americans. It horrified others. Their debate gripped the nation. The country’s best-known political and intellectual leaders took sides. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst pushed for imperial expansion; Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Andrew Carnegie preached restraint. Only once before—in the period when the United States was founded—have so many brilliant Americans so eloquently debated a question so fraught with meaning for all humanity. All Americans, regardless of political perspective, can take inspiration from the titans who faced off in this epic confrontation. Their words are amazingly current. Every argument over America’s role in the world grows from this one. It all starts here.

In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship. More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large. This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories. Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner

From the day Commodore Dewey's battleships destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila to the closing of the Subic Bay naval base in 1992, America and the Philippines have shared a long and tangled history. It has been a century of war and colonialism, earnest reforms and blatant corruption, diplomatic maneuvering and political intrigue, an era colored by dramatic events and striking personalities. In Bound to Empire, acclaimed historian H.W. Brands gives us a brilliant account of the American involvement in the Philippines in a sweeping narrative filled with analytical insight. Ranging from the Spanish-American War to the fall of Ferdinand Marcos and beyond, Brands deftly weaves together the histories of both nations as he assesses America's great experiment with empire. He leaps from the turbulent American scene in the 1890s--the labor unrest, the panic of 1893, the emergence of Progressivism, the growing tension with Spain--to the shores of the newly acquired colony: Dewey's conquest of Manila, the vicious war against the Philippine insurgents, and the founding of American civilian rule. As Brands takes us through the following century, describing the efforts to "civilize" the Filipinos, the shaping of Philippine political practices, the impact of General MacArthur, and World War II and the Cold War, he provides fascinating insight into the forces and institutions that made American rule what it was, and the Republic of the Philippines what it is today. He uncovers the origins of the corruption and nepotism of post-independence Philippine politics, as well as the ambivalence of American rule, in which liberal principles of self-determination clashed with the desire for empire and a preoccupation first with Japan and later with communism. The book comes right up to the present day, with an incisive account of the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos, the accession (and subsequent troubles) of Corazon Aquino, the Communist guerrilla insurgency, and the debate over the American military bases. "Damn the Americans!" Manuel Quezon once said. "Why don't they tyrannize us more?" Indeed, as Brands writes, American rule in the Philippines was more benign than that of any other colonial power in the Pacific region. Yet it failed to foster a genuine democracy. This fascinating book explains why, in a perceptive account of a century of empire and its aftermath.

Our Country Then and Now takes us on a 400-year journey through America’s history, providing unique snapshots from African enslavement, native dispossession, financial scandals, and wars of expansion and aggression, interspersed with tales from author Richard C. Cook’s ancestry—from Puritan forebears to fighters in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to Midwest Pioneer farmers and their relations with native nations. As a former NASA whistleblower, then US Treasury analyst, Cook dwells in particular on how the financial oligarchy aggrandized itself via a fractional reserve banking system that ultimately corrupted America’s originally proclaimed democratic and egalitarian values. He addresses how the British, European, and US bankers hijacked the American monetary system by placing it under control of the Money Trust through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, how this then financed the British takedown of rival Germany, triggered the Great Depression by shipping US gold to Britain and Europe, and led to the Bretton Woods agreements, the creation of the International Monetary Fund, and the Marshall Plan, which combined to place the world’s economy under the control of the US dollar. After World War II, the US financial oligarchs created the “national security state” headed by the CIA to rule the world through assassinations, financial thievery, and overthrow of governments. They elevated the Soviet Union into a bogeymen to justify the vast quantity of Federal Reserve “money printing” required to subsidize an out-of-control war budget and hundreds of US military bases around the world. These measures led to worldwide dollar supremacy under control of the Rockefeller dynasty, with the US National Security State—aka today’s “Deep State”—and the CIA set up to enforce the bankers’ financial hegemony that has lasted until now. Finally Cook addresses his efforts, along with Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, that resulted in the NEED Act of 2011 intended to end the Federal Reserve, and restore democratic control over the nation’s financial system, explaining how such reforms could save the US from today’s terminal hollowed-out economy.

A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his nation’s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rim—from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi & Churchill Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last military figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one of America’s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a brilliant strategist or a vainglorious mountebank? Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse biography that peels back the layers of myth—both good and bad—and exposes the marrow of the man beneath. MacArthur’s life spans the emergence of the United States Army as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in three monumental conflicts—World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Herman’s magisterial book spans the full arc of MacArthur’s journey, from his elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines, supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthur’s strategic vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming the prophet of America’s destiny in the Pacific Rim. Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur was one of the first military heroes to cultivate his own public persona—the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from being killed in battle—his soldiers nicknamed him “Bullet Proof”—he had a strong sense of divine mission. “Mac” was a man possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a “supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.” Yet when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy both civilian and military authority was, Herman shows, a lifelong trait—and it would become his undoing. Tellingly, MacArthur once observed, “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.” To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is no small achievement. With Douglas MacArthur, Arthur Herman has set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American legend. Praise for Douglas MacArthur “This is revisionist history at its best and, hopefully, will reopen a debate about the judgment of history and MacArthur’s place in history.”—New York Journal of Books “Unfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the more important to encounter.”—The New Criterion “With Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, the prolific and talented historian Arthur Herman has delivered an expertly rendered, compulsively readable account that does full justice to MacArthur’s monumental achievements without slighting his equally monumental flaws.”—Commentary

As the author makes clear, every book has a history; Guerrilla Warfare is noexception. Together with its sequel Terrorism (and two companion readers) it was part of a wider study: to give a critical interpretation of guerrilla and terrorism theory and practice throughout history. It did not aim at providing a general theory of political violence, nor did it give instructions on how to conduct guerrilla warfare and terrorist operations. Its aim remains to bring about greater semantic and analytic clarity, and to do so at psychological as well as political levels. While the word guerrilla has been very popular, much less attention has been given to guerrilla warfare than to terrorism - even though the former has been politically more successful. The reasons for the lack of detailed attention are obvious: guerrilla operations take place far from big cities, in the countryside, in remote regions of a nation. In such areas there are no film cameras or recorders. In his probing new introduction, Laqueur points out that a review of strategies and the fate of guerrilla movements during the last two decades show certain common features. Both mainly concerned nationalists fighting for independence either against foreign occupants or against other ethnic groups within their own country. But despite the many attempts, only in two places—Afghanistan and Chechnya —were the guerrillas successful. According to Laqueur historical experience demonstrates that guerrilla movements have prevailed over incumbents only in specific conditions. Due to a constellation of factors, ranging from modern means of observation to increase in firepower. The author suggests that we may witness a combination of political warfare, propaganda, guerrilla operations and terrorism. In such cases, this could be a potent strategy for unsponsored revolutionary change. But either as social history or military strategy this work remains a crucial work of our times.