Pan-American Exposition

During the ensuing summer, a business section developed: a string of one- and two-story structures housing a bank, a general store, a Chinese laundry, and more, all of it resembling a mining outpost. On Christmas night of 1896, a fire broke out that…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Yet the mainland public made surprisingly little of the “scrape.” A seven-city revolt in the United States’ largest colony that included an assassination attempt on its governor, that required suppression by airpower, and that nearly killed the U.S. president made brief headlines, but rarely were the dots connected. The New York Times shrugged it o

On March 1, 1954, shortly after the UN’s decision, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington. They made their way to the upstairs gallery, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and shouted “¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” Then they pulled out pistols and fired twenty-nine rounds into the body politic below. It was, the Speaker of the H

In a world of rising empires, one was conspicuously faltering: Spain’s. Once a vast imperium extending from California to Buenos Aires, it had been reduced, in the Western Hemisphere, to Cuba and Puerto Rico and, in the Pacific, to the Philippines and a set of Micronesian islands. Even these, Spain could barely hold. The late nineteenth century had