A ten-week war handed America an overseas empire
From 21 April to 13 August 1898 the United States fought Spain after the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor on 15 February. The December Treaty of Paris transferred Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to Washington and left Cuba a protected independent state by 1902.
Spain's empire had been eroding through Peninsular War losses, American independence wars, and Carlist conflicts, while the United States rose as a regional power. Cuban nationalists rebelled in 1895 against harsh colonial suppression; U.S. yellow journalism amplified atrocity stories, though historians such as W. Joseph Campbell caution against treating the press as the sole cause. Business ties were already deep: by 1894 some ninety percent of Cuban exports went to the United States, dwarfing trade with Spain.
Maine arrived in January 1898 to shield American citizens. Its mysterious explosion, plus political pressure on President McKinley, produced a Cuban blockade on 21 April and Spanish war declarations soon after. Naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan and rising figures such as Theodore Roosevelt had already argued for steel fleets and Caribbean-Pacific bases, including dreams of an isthmian canal that needed coaling stations.
Paris terms favoured the victor: island cessions plus a Philippine payment, and Cuban formal independence that functioned as a U.S. protectorate. The brief war marked open American intervention in the Cuban Independence struggle and a leap from continental republic to Pacific-Caribbean imperial steward—celebrated by some as liberation, condemned by others as a new colonialism wearing republican clothes.
Markers: fighting April–August 1898; Maine sunk 15 February; Treaty of Paris 10 December 1898; Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines acquired; Cuba on a protectorate path formally independent in 1902.
Source: Spanish–American War
