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. |
From inside the book
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... President James Monroe ( 1758-1831 ) in his 2 December 1823 address to the United States Congress , the doctrine asserted that European powers could no longer seek colonial territories in the Americas and that the US was the rightful ...
... President William McKinley and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt who were already beginning to envision a more bellicose and expansionist America . A champion of masculinity and imperial values , Davis was perhaps the ...
... President of the United States ; Winston Churchill ( 1874-1965 ) , British Prime Minister , author of numerous works , including the six volume history , The Second World War ( 1948–53 ) , and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature ...
... president of the Bethle- hem Iron Company . Thurston was in Cuba to oversee a mining operation , and the sojourn proved critical to Davis ' career : it supplied him with the raw materials and settings for Soldiers . Upon his return , he ...
... president of the Bethlehem Steel Company . 1886-89 Works as a cub reporter for the Record , but is fired for sub - standard work . Soon lands a position at another Philadelphia newspaper , the Press : interviews Walt Whitman and covers ...