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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... Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the Spanish - American War 228 Appendix B : How Others Saw Davis • 1. Booth Tarkington , " Richard Harding Davis " ( 1916 ) 229 2. From Theodore Roosevelt , letter to James Brander Matthews ( 6 ...
... Theodore Roosevelt , " The Strenuous Life " ( 10 April 1899 ) • 252 4. From William James , " Letter on Governor Roosevelt's Oration " ( 15 April 1899 ) 255 Appendix F : Davis and Others on American Imperialism • 1. From John L. O ...
... Theodore Roosevelt . ( Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , Volume I , ed . Elting E. Morison . Cambridge , MA : Harvard UP , 1951. ) Introduction In January 1897 , Richard Harding Davis , in ...
... 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 most important writer of the American fin de siècle to herald ...
... Theodore Roosevelt , and Winston Churchill.2 Davis seems to have known just about 1 For more on Twain ( 1835-1910 ) , his views on the US colonial war in the Philippines following the Spanish - American War , and the politics of the ...