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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... voice to those of men like President William McKinley and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt who were already beginning to envision a more bellicose and expansionist America . A champion of masculinity and imperial ...
... voice of social Darwinism , speaks for capital : " Ce n'est pas mon affaire . I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses . I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches . The Lord will take care of his own ...
... voices in the nation . While Martí proceeds cautiously in his defense of Cuban inde- pendence from both Spain and the US , Twain attacks with a Swift - like fury , decrying the policies of McKinley and Roosevelt . The arguments set ...
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