r/AskHistorians - Reddit

The Philippines was the largest U.S. colony. A similar story played out in the second-largest, Puerto Rico. The Depression had wreaked havoc on the island: unemployment, strikes, and—egged on by Pedro Albizu Campos—violence. It was the assassination by nationalists of Police Chief E. Francis Riggs that truly rattled the colonial authorities. He was

... See more

Simón Bolívar, their liberator, suggested an answer as early as 1815: there would never be, he acknowledged, a United States of Latin America.86 One reason was geography. It might be easier to rule an empire from its seaports than from its interior, but this didn’t prepare a nation to rule itself: the internal barriers of climate, topography, habit

... See more