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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... father , L. ( Lemuel ) Clarke Davis ( 1835-1904 ) , was born in Sandusky , Ohio , but Clarke's father relocated the Davises to Philadelphia following the death of his wife . An intellectual , courtly young man , Clarke studied law and ...
... father's profession and began his ascent , with a few bumps along the way , of the literary and social worlds of fin de siècle America . With his father's assistance , Davis secured a position as a cub reporter at the Philadelphia ...
... father - but she eventually began to recipro- cate his affections . After their wedding , they settled into Cross- roads , and Davis once more poured his energies into work , penning numerous short stories and plays ( he wrote twenty ...
... father - to assume pre - eminence in a family of writers . Rather than seeking to replace his father in his mother's affec- tions , as Sigmund Freud would have it in the Oedipal complex , Davis sought to replace his mother in the ...
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