Soldiers of FortuneBroadview Press, 2006 M06 2 - 272 pages A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority. |
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Richard Harding Davis Brady Harrison. Acknowledgements A number of people and institutions have given generously of their time , energy , and expertise to this project , and I am very grateful for their assistance . In particular , my ...
... Davis at last gave up on a formal education , but before looking for employment , took a trip to Santiago , Cuba , with William W. Thurston , an old friend and president of the Bethle- hem Iron Company . Thurston was in Cuba to oversee ...
... Davis then really got to work and embarked on the most important adventures and books of his career . In January 1895 , in the company of Somers Somerset , a twenty - year old British heir to the dukedom of Beaufort , and Lloyd Griscom ...
... Davis emerged from the journey with a raft of imperial attitudes and assumptions about the desirability and rightness of US interventionism , and he brought these forward - in resplen- dent fashion - to his next book , Soldiers of ...
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