America's Forgotten Wars

Americans know about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the world wars, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan but the many inbetween conflicts have been erased from public memory. And, as there was for the British Empire, there were a lot of them. Many have a particular resonance for Trump’s America. The Texas–Mexico border conflict (1917) for example saw Hispanic farmers murdered as America prepared to invade south of the border – no Trump Wall then.

The US kept 150 men as official prisoners of war for thirty-six years after a conflict that ended in 1873 – which one? America’s Forgotten Wars is full of surprises, many of them coloured by irony and often tragedy: the Barbary Wars (1801–03), as a supremely ironic instance, were fought to end the North African slave trade. The Philippines War of 1899 is one of the the worst stains on US military and political history in that it caused the deaths of over 200,000 civilians. A companion volume to Ian Hernon’s best-selling Britain’s Forgotten Wars, this book puts US history in a whole new different light.