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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... called the corre- spondent a " knight of the pen " from our " free and enlightened land " -the reporter's worldly experience ostensibly baptized him as an American representative . Thus , when he pro- nounced on " civilized " conduct or ...
... called for a more truculent foreign policy in his non- fiction , he also dramatized his beliefs in his most celebrated novel , Soldiers of Fortune ( 1897 ) . A hugely popular and com- mercially successful adventure tale , Soldiers was ...
... called the key to the position . If the men had been regulars I would have sat in the rear as B- did , but I knew every other one of them , had played football , and all that sort of thing , with them , so I thought as an American I ...
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