Correspondence relating to the war with Spain : including the insurrection in the Philippine Islands and the China Relief Expedition, April 15, 1898, to July 30, 1902

For the United States Army, the Spanish-American War of 1898 possesses significance far beyond the familiar image of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill. The war was a major event in the Army's evolution from a frontier constabulary into the military arm of a twentieth-century world power. During the conflict, the Army gained its first experience in overseas deployment and support of major expeditionary forces, literally on opposite sides of the world. Following the war with Spain, the Army waged and won a difficult counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines that in many respects foreshadowed the later struggle in Vietnam. In the China relief expedition of 1900 Army troops participated in their first multinational coalition operation.

In recent years the historiography of the Spanish-American War has moved far beyond the kind of semisatirical popular account typified by Walter Millis' The Martial Spirit. Present-day historians, using the wide range of primary source materials now available, have examined the complexity and importance of the war's diplomacy and military operations in the context of tum-of-the-century American political and institutional history.

Influenced by the so-called New Military History, recent students of the war and its associated events have broadened their focus beyond the traditional tactical and operational themes. The social history of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Army, the influence of American culture on American war making, the black experience in the wars of empire, and the Army's role in government and counterinsurgency in the Philippines all have been the subject of important recent works.

At the time of the war and since, the Army's official efforts to record the history of the conflict have been minimal. Although in 1898 the War Department only recently had completed publication of the monumental Official Records of the Union and Confederate