The Spanish-American war was waged between April 21st, 1898 and August 13rd, 1898. The American side entered the war in the form of an armed intervention, joining with the rebels fighting Spanish rule of the island. This marks a milestone in the history of US foreign policy. This undergraduate thesis attempts to analyze the political, economic and cultural circumstances, that have led to a sudden shift in the country’s international reputation. In a few short years the USA would morph from a second rate isolationist power to one of the strongest economic and military powers in the world. The last hundred years of historiography on the Spanish-American war is marked by a change in the valuation of the influence that the yellow press had on the outburst of the war. The papers New York World and New York Journal were often credited for inflaming public grievances by overusing sensationalist reporting to such an extent that the resulting public outrage supposedly coerced US politicians to go to war. In the last decades, this point of view has been disregarded. I wanted to know why, what the accepted historiography of the conflict is today, and how the yellow press influenced the creation of public attitudes - specifically in the context of defining Cuba by using metaphorical representations.
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