Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War was fought in 1898 between the United States and Spain, triggered by American public and political pressure over Spain's harsh suppression of a Cuban independence uprising and inflamed by the still-unexplained sinking of the American battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898, which American newspapers widely blamed on Spain. The war was fought on two main fronts, with American naval victories destroying Spanish fleets at Manila Bay in the Philippines and off Santiago de Cuba, while American land forces, including Theodore Roosevelt's volunteer Rough Riders, secured Cuba within a few months of fighting. The brief war ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1898, under which Spain relinquished Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and sold the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars, ending Spain's centuries-old colonial empire in the Americas and the Pacific. The war marked the emergence of the United States as an imperial power holding overseas colonial territory, a shift that touched off a prolonged and bloody Philippine-American War when Filipino independence fighters resisted the transfer of colonial rule from Spain to the United States.