Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of the Philippines.

This interdisciplinary case study invokes historical, sociological, and anthropological means to examine the ascendance of the United States to a world power in its first imperial venture. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898 the U.S. acquired and occupied the Philippine Islands for nearly a half century in an attempt to install a democratic form of government, a capitalist economy, the Protestant religion, and a particular value system. Sport became a primary means to achieve such goals, fostered initially by the military, and then widely promoted in the schools and the YMCA. Competitive programs, including international athletic spectacles, channeled Filipino nationalism against Asian rivals rather than the American occupiers as guerrilla warfare ensued in the islands. The strategies learned in the Philippines, now known as “soft power” remain prominent factors in current American foreign policy.

Leon Ma. Guerrero (1915–82), a top-notch writer and diplomat, served six Philippine presidents, beginning with President Manuel L. Quezon and ending with President Ferdinand E. Marcos. In this first full-length biography, Guerrero’s varied career as writer and diplomat is highlighted from an amateur student editor and associate editor of a prestigious magazine to ambassador to different countries that reflected then the exciting directions of Philippine foreign policy. But did you know that he served as public prosecutor in the notorious Nalundasan murder case, involving the future Philippine president? Did you also know that during his stint as ambassador to the Court of Saint James he wrote his prize-winning biography of Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal? Learn more about him in this fully documented biography recounting with much detail from his correspondence the genesis and evolution of his thinking about the First Filipino, which is the apposite title of his magnum opus.

American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines tells the story of U.S. colonialists who attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to build an enduring American empire in the Philippines through the production of space. From concrete interventions in infrastructure, urban planning, and built environments to more abstract projects of mapping and territorialization, the book traces the efforts of U.S. Insular Government agents to make space for empire in the Philippines through forms of territory, map, landscape, and road, and how these spaces were understood as solutions to problems of colonial rule. Through the lens of space, the book offers an original history of a highly transformative, but largely misunderstood or forgotten, imperial moment, when the Philippine archipelago, made up of thousands of islands and an ethnically and religiously diverse population of more than seven million, became the unlikely primary setting for U.S. experimentation with formal colonial governance. Telling that story around key figures including Cameron Forbes, Daniel Burnham, Dean Worcester, and William Howard Taft, the book provides distinctive chapters dedicated to spaces of territory (sovereignty), maps (knowledge), landscape (aesthetics), and roads (circulation), suggesting new and integrative historical geographical approaches. This book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Historical, and Political Geography, American History, American Studies, Philippine Studies, Southeast Asia/Philippines; Asian Studies as well as general readers interested in these areas.

Challenging global history's Euro-American orientation, this study centres China and the Philippines in the early twentieth-century.

“Illuminating.… An eloquent testament to a doomed city and its people.” —The Wall Street Journal In early 1945, General Douglas MacArthur prepared to reclaim Manila, America’s Pearl of the Orient, which had been seized by the Japanese in 1942. Convinced the Japanese would abandon the city, he planned a victory parade down Dewey Boulevard—but the enemy had other plans. The Japanese were determined to fight to the death. The battle to liberate Manila resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese forces that brutalized the civilian population, resulting in a massacre as horrific as the Rape of Nanking. Drawing from war-crimes testimony, after-action reports, and survivor interviews, Rampage recounts one of the most heartbreaking chapters of Pacific War history.

Genevieve Alva Clutario traces how beauty and fashion in the Philippines shaped the intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation building during the turbulent transition between Spanish, US, and Japanese empires.