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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... turned to writing travel pieces and adventure tales , and at the end of 1890 quit his job as a reporter at the Evening Sun to become the managing editor at Harper's Weekly . The next five years were a remarkably productive time for ...
... turned his articles into two books about the war , A Year from a Reporter's Notebook ( 1898 ) and The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns ( 1898 ) . To say the least , the Spanish - American War was good to Davis , but it also marked the ...
... turned down Davis ' pro- posal , but she relented and became his companion on many of his subsequent adventures : she traveled with him to South Africa in January 1900 , in order that he could report on the Boer War ; she also traveled ...
... turned out to be the new Eden , but rather a dystopic wasteland of pain and degradation . Davis , like his mother , centers his novel on iron as an emblem of economic power , but rather than offering a critique of the excesses and ...
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