Adams County in The Splendid Little War, April through August 1898

The Spanish American War lasted less than four months (April 25 to August 13, 1898). For the entire war, American casualties totaled less than 2,000 men, among them 345 killed or mortally wounded. Many more, however, died of disease (about 2000). Over the years, the war has been remembered as an event in which American interests and yellow journalism led to a conflict where the outcome was never in doubt. The nation of Spain, embroiled in internal dispute and civil unrest, was ripe for the picking and could do little to organize a defense of her colonies against a nation that was quickly becoming one of the world\u27s superpowers. Today, using hindsight, it is easy for us to view the war in this fashion, but the men involved had no such insights. In this, the centennial of the Spanish American War, it is important to take a fresh look at the struggle through the eyes of the men who witnessed the events firsthand. These men had no idea that the war would be over so quickly or that American forces would be so successful. Like the men of other wars, they did their duty and deserve to be remembered. [excerpt

The Colonizing Mission of the U.S. in Puerto Rico

In the summer of 1898 the United States attained its long-standing goal of acquiring strategic insular possessions in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Moreover, with its decisive defeat of Spain, U.S. expansionists could rightly claim that their nation had achieved imperial status. But the United States not only appropriated far-flung exotic islands but also claimed sovereignty over approximately 10 million inhabitants of the lands ceded by Spain1 The sobering question that confronted the United States after the euphoria of military victory was the legal status and political rights of these subject peoples. Eventually it devised a complicated structure of laws that prescribed a distinctive citizenship status for the subjects of each of its territorial possessions (Smith, 1997: 428). While the inhabitants of the territories were all perceived to he so racially and culturally different as to justify their permanent exclusion from the American polity, U.S. empire builders believed that effective colonial rule required that they be Americanized. Colonial administrations embarked on ambitious campaigns to transform the legal systems and codes of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines and to install a program of universal public education of which English-language instruction was the cornerstone. While Americanization, or the colonizing mission, was never a coherent policy, it did identify the general outlines of the institutional transformation and political change that the colonial governors were expected to undertake. Colonial officials were permitted, indeed expected, to modify the content of the Americanization programs to adjust to local conditions

BOOK NOTES AND NOTICES

This department undertakes to list and, when possible, describe briefly current books on law and related subjects (e.g. economics, business, finance, sociology, government, etc.) which are of possible value to the legal profession

Plenary Power: Teaching The Immigration Law Of The Territories

Immigration law dominates national headlines and policy debates while immigrant communities struggle to secure legal representation. Law students are increasingly aware of these issues, often bringing lived experiences of the immigration system into the classroom. As immigration law professors seek to engage these students with doctrinal and clinical coursework, they often struggle to incorporate policy priorities and executive actions that shift with the political winds. In this tumult, many immigration law professors fail to realize that there is an entire body of U.S. immigration law they are not teaching-the immigration law of the U.S. territories. Indeed, many professors may not know that two of the five territories are not even subject to U.S. immigration law. Yet, the operation of immigration law in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands offers a wealth of examples that reinforce existing themes and concepts in immigration law. This essay lays forward some of the central concepts taught in immigration legal doctrine and describes the immigration systems of the U.S. territories, including those that are exempt from federal immigration law. It then ties the legal principles at play in each system, including the central concept of the federal political branches\u27 plenary power over the territories and noncitizens alike, to topics presently taught in immigration law coursework

Taylor University Echo: May 11, 1920

May — Taylor Students Hear Russian Symphony Orchestra — Union Evangelistic Services Being Held in Upland — A Visit by Two Taylor Missionaries — The H. C. Of L. — W. C. T. U. Silver Medal Contest — Local News — Farewell Dinner — Alumni News — F. Bert Stant — The Endowment — Late Gain — Calendar — My Ideal Book — Statehood for Porto Rico — History of I. P. A. At Taylor — Tennis — Eureka Report — College Senior Class — Holiness League — Jokes — Taylor Universityhttps://pillars.taylor.edu/echo-1919-1920/1021/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the Critique of Rights: The Puerto Rico Legal Project and Civil Rights Litigation in America\u27s Colony

Long skeptical of the ability of rights to advance oppressed groups’ political goals, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars might consider a U.S. territory like Puerto Rico and ask, “What good are rights when you live in a colony?” In this Note, I will argue that CLS’s critique of rights, though compelling in the abstract, falters in the political and historical context of Puerto Rico. Although it may appear that rights have failed Puerto Ricans, rights talk has historically provided a framework for effective organizing and community action. Building on the work of Critical Race Theory and LatCrit scholars, this Note counters the CLS intuition that rights talk lacks value by focusing on the origins and development of the Puerto Rico Legal Project, an understudied but critical force for community development and legal advocacy on the island that was founded in response to severe political repression during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This Note draws on original interviews with Puerto Rican and U.S. lawyers and community activists to reveal fissures in the critique of rights and to propose certain revisions to the theory. By concentrating on the entitlements that rights are thought to provide, CLS’s critique of rights ignores the power of rights discourse to organize marginalized communities. The critique of rights also overlooks the value of the collective efforts that go into articulating a particular community’s aspirations through rights talk, efforts which can be empowering and help spur further political action. By analyzing twentieth-century Puerto Rican legal and political history and the Puerto Rico Legal Project, I demonstrate the value (and limits) of rights in a colonized nation

Puerto Rico: Cultural Nation, American Colony

This Article articulates a theory of Puerto Rican cultural nationhood that is largely based on ethnicity. In linking ethnicity and citizenship, it is imperative, however, to avoid the evils of ethnic strife and balkanization, while celebrating rather than imposing difference; community consciousness cannot degenerate into fascism

"ADVANCING THE KINGDOM": MISSIONARIES AND AMERICANIZATION IN PUERTO RICO, 1898-1930s

This dissertation examines the role of Protestant missionaries in Americanizing Puerto Rico from 1898 into the 1930s. It contends that Americanization was a dynamic, contingent, multi-directional, and contradictory process that had unintended consequences. These included the development of insular nationalism and Puerto Ricans' employment of Americanization's liberal ideology to make claims against the missionary establishment and the colonial state. Demonstrating that Protestants functioned as an advance guard for the colonial state in the areas of education and health care, it nevertheless argues that many missionaries began to question and then sharply criticized the entire civilizing project because of its harmful effects on most Puerto Ricans' living and working conditions and on the island's natural environment. It also argues that, in addition to its disciplinary aspects, the missionary project had emancipatory effects, including an expansion of the public sphere in terms of content and participation and the introduction of new social and occupational roles for women.By focusing on relations between non-elite actors, this dissertation contributes to understanding how imperial relations were constructed on the ground. Though sharing fundamental goals with the colonial state, missionaries, unlike colonial officials, spoke Spanish and interacted with Puerto Ricans of all classes. Additionally, women missionaries played an active, highly visible role in this civilizing venture. This study examines missionary reform efforts and Puerto Rican responses to them, paying particular attention to the ways that missionary and local understandings of race, class, and gender shaped the outcomes of those efforts. It argues that local social and material conditions, ideologies, and practices significantly shaped missionaries' methods and accomplishments or failures. Additionally, it argues the need for carefully historicizing Americanization, for those local actors and conditions were undergoing radical, precipitous changes. Using a case study, for example, it shows how local and metropolitan ideologies of white racial superiority combined to first include and later exclude Afro Puerto Rican women from nursing education. It also argues that some Puerto Ricans embraced the civilizing mission because they, too, were modernizers and advocates of pre-existing reform agendas constructed by Puerto Ricans such as Eugenia María de Hostos