1898 was the year America crossed the threshold from continental republic to overseas empire. In ten months, the United States acquired colonies spanning the Caribbean and Pacific, engaged in brutal counterinsurgency against Filipino independence fighters, and abandoned the founders’ foreign policy principles. This episode examines the manufactured justification for war (the Maine explosion, likely an internal accident), the Philippine-American War’s atrocities (reconcentration, waterboarding, orders to kill children), the Anti-Imperialist League’s prophetic warnings, and Theodore Roosevelt’s ideology of imperial nationalism. The transformation was comprehensive—and the patterns established then have shaped American foreign policy ever since.
