The Philippines was the largest U.S. colony. A similar story played out in the second-largest, Puerto Rico. The Depression had wreaked havoc on the island: unemployment, strikes, and—egged on by Pedro Albizu Campos—violence. It was the assassination by nationalists of Police Chief E. Francis Riggs that truly rattled the colonial authorities. He was

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Clinton and Giuliani marched in a parade for Albizu, but did they know who he was? Very likely not. The epic battle between Muñoz Marín and Albizu in the fifties transformed Puerto Rican society, but it barely registered elsewhere. If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entire

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Albizu had changed since the First World War. After failing to get to the Paris Peace Conference, he’d finished his law degree at Harvard. But his enthusiasm for the United States had flagged. The dream of Puerto Ricans in 1898 had been that the island could become a prosperous state, on an equal footing with those of the mainland. By 1930, that dr

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