The War of 1898: The United States a Cuba in History a Historiography. By Pérez Louis A. Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 171. Notes. Index. $16.95.)
This tightly-written examination of the import of the Spanish-Cuban-United States War of 1898 demonstrates that "modes of historical explanation have . . . been simultaneously fitted within and derived from the moral hierarchies of the nation, fashioned in such a manner as to represent the ideals to which the nation professed dedication. The telling of 1898—in historical discourses, both popular and professional, repeated and refined—has served as a means of self-affirmation of what the nation is, or perhaps more correctly what the nation thinks itself to be, as past and present have been conjoined in the service of self-revelation" (p. x). As a touchstone for American self-identity in the twentieth century, then, the explanations for the War of 1898 illustrate not only the mythic aspirations of the United States but also more specifically the historian's participation in sustaining that national tradition.