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This chapter addresses President William McKinley's selling of the War of 1898, the overseas empire that resulted from that war, and the so-called Philippine Insurrection that followed. It focuses squarely on the White House and the importance McKinley and his advisors attached to public opinion and the ways they evaluated and sought to manipulate it. The president quickly grasped the growing importance of public opinion and developed new means to influence it in his favor. The chapter concludes that McKinley's actions created not only new standards in presidential rhetoric that would prove instructive to his successors in the Oval Office, but also set precedents that foreshadowed the problems and risks inherent in manipulating public opinion.

This chapter deals with the War of 1898, the US-Philippine War, and other small-scale conflicts at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on Edward Stratemeyer’s so-called literary syndicate and the series fiction it produced. Perhaps the most prolific author in American history, Stratemeyer began his career by educating American youths about their country’s newfound commitments abroad. Yet the fan mail adolescents sent to Stratemeyer reveals a more complicated picture, one in which young people expressed their own thoughts on the subject.

This chapter focuses on the three largest and only independent nations of the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century – Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic – and their vulnerability to and struggles with a new overseas power in the region, the United States. At the time, hard-earned forms of popular land access and their defence against expanding U.S. plantations and local land owners by armed rural bands and others impeded the development of central state control over rural populations and economies, control sought by both local elites and the U.S. government and corporations. This peasant autonomy and resistance, and what U.S. leaders perceived as overall failed central states in their “backyard,” shaped long and repeated U.S. military occupations of these countries. Resistance to U.S. rule was fierce, widespread, and armed, but the U.S. military withdrew only after it established powerful national militaries and effective central states expected to be dutiful to U.S. interests. These militaries were crucial to the post-occupation rise of some of the most ruthless and long-lasting dictators in Caribbean history.

In tracing the social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances that led to Miami’s municipal incorporation in 1896, this chapter unearths the queer origins of the city’s urban frontier. It argues that Miami’s identity and traditions were constantly in flux, imbued by numerous effects from the city’s colonial past, its roots in the U.S. South and North, and a multitude of Caribbean influences. The chapter shows how the establishment of Miami’s segregated and racialized sex and vice district was a product of conscientious, albeit uneven, urban design. An examination of criminal records, municipal documents, and newspaper reports reveals how Miami’s queer frontier took shape through a prism of competing colonial exchanges, transgressive sex acts, interracial encounters, and working-class vices. Urban boosters promoted the instant city of Miami through several countervailing visions: the natural environment and the urban landscape, the traditional and the modern, and the respectable and subversive.

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.