Cuba in War Time

Name: Cuba in War Time
Price: 18.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Harding Davis

By Richard Harding Davis

A pioneering foreign correspondent, Richard Harding Davis delivers a gripping eyewitness account of Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. With vivid battlefield reporting and a sharp eye for the human cost of war, Davis captures the brutal conditions of guerrilla warfare and the resilience of those caught in the conflict, offering an unfiltered look at a pivotal moment in global history.

$18.00

ISBN: 9781967190041
ebook ISBN: 9781967190058
On Sale: September 30, 2025
Pages: 96

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Overview

Initially published in 1897, Cuba in War Time brought readers onto the battlefields with a style that was urgent, immersive, and unmistakably modern. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his generation, filed vivid, morally charged dispatches, capturing everything from Spanish atrocities to the execution of a young Cuban rebel, and helped transform frontline reporting into a new literary form and a potent political force. Davis’s work helped ignite public support for the Spanish-American War, and his account of the Battle of San Juan Hill turned a young Theodore Roosevelt into a national hero. Yet his work often blurred the line between fact and spectacle, revealing how easily journalism could be swept into the causes it chronicled.

This edition reexamines Davis’s legacy with a searching new introduction by Peter Maass, a celebrated war reporter himself. A foundational text in the history of American media, Cuba in War Time remains as gripping and unsettling as the events it describes.

Read Peter Maass’ introduction on Lit Hub

Read CGR Director Nicholas Lemann’s Letter to the Reader about the Forerunners series

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About the Author

Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) was the most prominent American correspondent of his era, covering the Spanish-American War, Second Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. He helped shape public support for US intervention in Cuba and later served as managing editor of Harper’s Weekly. He also published a wide range of popular novels, plays, short stories, and travel books, including Soldiers of Fortune, Gallegher and Other Stories, and Notes of a War Correspondent.

Peter Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, which won a Los Angeles Times book prize and the Overseas Press Club’s book prize, and Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s award for excellence in journalism. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he has written about war, media, and national security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Intercept.