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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... hand of time for centuries , who lie to our repre- sentatives daily , who butcher innocent people , who gamble with the lives of their own soldiers in order to gain a few more 1 Already well - known as a journalist and sketch artist ...
... hand helped push the nation toward war with Spain and thereby did its part in the creation of the turn- of - the - century spectacular American empire . The US had already achieved a more circumspect hemispheric hegemony , but as Mark ...
... hands . " 1 To say the least , 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 ...
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