Splendid Little Papers from the “Splendid Little War”: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War

“Splendid Little Papers” recovers a forgotten moment in the print culture history of U.S. empire by examining a handful of newspapers and periodicals—Bounding Billow, American Soldier, Manila Outpost, and Volunteer—that were founded and written by and for U.S. soldiers in the Philippines and Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Foregrounding their status as periodicals, this essay argues that soldier papers used the formal technologies of print to remap the nation’s relationship with the world and in the process helped their readers see themselves as part of an imagined community of empire.