One obvious consequence of the Yankee victory of '98, already well understood, was that many of fin-de-siecle Spanish thinkers and artists began to seek reasons for Spain's failure to hold on to her empire. But in the America of 1998 there was no official effort to commemorate this turning-point in the country's international status,(2) while in Spain, where the defeat had been a national calamity, historians and scholars organized symposia to study the effects of the disaster. It was the beginning of America's often tragic relationship with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, still tinged with residual hatred for colonialism. It also dragged the naive, isolationist United States into international politics not only on islands in the familiar waters of the Caribbean but in remote Pacific archipelagos. The year 1998 marked the hundredth anniversary of the USA's victory in the "splendid little war," to quote the future Secretary of State John Hay's description of the Spanish American conflict,(1) though the "little" war had great consequences for Spain and her former colonies. The Spanish-American War and Nationalism in the Arts For Arthur Graham, peerless tenor, who for thirty years has listened to my amateur musicology with admirable forbearance
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