On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over.

Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Senate and the indispensable power broker in the colony. Quezon was a master politician, adept at playing all sides at once. He had served on Aguinaldo’s staff (at age twenty) during the war, but after Aguinaldo’s surrender, he’d spied for the colonial government and helped bring the holdouts to heel.

Sanctuary was hard to find. “If you escaped the shells of the Americans, you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese,”

The mainland may not have depended on the Philippines, but after decades of U.S. rule, the Philippines depended on the mainland very much. By the 1930s, about four-fifths of its trade was going there. And although the colonial government had built a small native army to quash local rebellions, the Philippines had been prevented from developing an o

The Battle of Manila Bay, as the resulting conflict was known, made an auspicious start to the war. “Nineteenth century civilization and fifteenth century medievalism lay confronting each other” is how Dewey’s aide described the scene. In just over six hours on May 1, 1898, Dewey sank or captured every Spanish ship. The captain of Spain’s flagship

The pretense that all victims of the Japanese were guerrillas was easily dispensed with, as when troops rounded up hundreds of young women for sexual predation. Large hotels, including MacArthur’s Manila Hotel, became the site of organized mass rapes. Diaries kept during the Battle of Manila are replete with other stomach-churning atrocities: pregn

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak.

“The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.

The U.S. Army had about twenty thousand soldiers in or around Manila. The Army of Liberation’s numbers are harder to know, but estimates ranged from fifteen thousand to forty thousand. The United States Army had better weapons, but the Philippine Army knew the terrain.