Explain the causes and consequences of the Spanish-American War and evaluate the debate over American imperialism using primary-source arguments from both sides.
In 1898 the United States fought a brief war with Spain that transformed it from a continental power into an overseas empire. Cuban rebels had been fighting Spanish rule for years; American "yellow journalism" newspapers, competing for readers, ran sensational and sometimes exaggerated stories of Spanish cruelty. When the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana's harbor in February 1898, killing 266 sailors, much of the American press blamed Spain (historians today think an internal accident was more likely) and the public demanded war. The Spanish-American War lasted only a few months; the U.S. gained Puerto Rico and Guam outright, temporarily occupied Cuba, and -- in a move many Americans did not expect going in -- purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. Filipino rebels who had been fighting Spain for independence felt betrayed and turned their fight against their new American occupiers, in a brutal Philippine-American War (1899-1902) that killed far more people than the war with Spain had.
The Philippines purchase set off a genuine national debate that is worth reading in the participants' own words. Expansionists like Senator Albert Beveridge argued America had a duty to govern "less civilized" peoples and spread its institutions, echoing Manifest Destiny's old logic on a global stage. The American Anti-Imperialist League -- an unusual coalition including Mark Twain, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and social reformer Jane Addams -- argued that ruling a colonized people without their consent betrayed the nation's own founding ideal of self-government. Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy after 1901 leaned firmly toward the expansionist side: his 1904 Roosevelt Corollary declared the U.S. would act as the Western Hemisphere's "police power," and in 1903 the U.S. backed Panama's revolution against Colombia specifically to secure rights to build the Panama Canal, completed in 1914.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the Spanish-American War's outcome, state one argument from each side of the imperialism debate accurately, and describe the Roosevelt Corollary's effect on U.S.-Latin American relations.
Common stumbles: Assuming the "yellow journalism caused the war" story is the whole explanation, or skipping the Philippine-American War entirely because it happened after the more famous war ended.