When Americans Became ‘Splendid Liberators’
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
America spent most of the 19th century at war with itself. It conquered its western expanse then collapsed into civil war. Once the North beat the South, partisan politics consumed the country for a generation. A string of assassinations, progressive firebrands, and civil service reforms burned people out on domestic politics and a bored and febrile nation began to search for meaning beyond its borders. It noticed the Spanish Empire was awfully close.
In Splendid Liberators, award winning journalist Joe Jackson chronicles the beginning of the American myth of the “good war.” He’s on the show today to talk to us about Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and a general who lay in state at the Alamo.
- Recurring patterns in American history
- Roscoe Conkling jumpscare
- Remnants of the Spanish-American War in South Carolina
- What did liberty mean in the 19th century?
- Clara Barton, Leonard Wood and the dual American personality
- The first modern concentration camps
- The Battleship of Maine
- When Congress used to fight, physically
- Drones won’t win a war
- The US in the Philippines
- ‘The water cure’
- American historians facing reality in the Philippines
- Teddy, finally
- Laying in state at the Alamo
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:17.4 | How are you doing today? I'm fine. How are you? I'm doing all right. |
| 0:22.7 | I've been generally in a state of high anxiety, I think, the last 12 months, as many other Americans perhaps are, but been reading a lot of history. |
| 0:34.4 | And it's calming me down a little bit. |
| 0:36.6 | Is it really? |
| 0:37.5 | It is, actually, yeah. |
| 0:39.1 | That's interesting. |
| 0:40.1 | So you see that there are recurring patterns and it's like, okay, this isn't the end of the |
| 0:44.7 | world? |
| 0:45.6 | Yeah, that's exactly. |
| 0:46.7 | Yeah, especially like specifically in America, like reading American history. |
| 0:50.2 | And I'm like, okay, it's going to be like, this is bad. |
| 0:53.6 | Right. |
| 0:56.0 | To be clear. And it shouldn't be happening. |
| 0:57.7 | But like, and there are things that are unique about the specific situation we're in, but like, |
| 1:03.7 | we've kind of done, we do this, right, this country. |
| 1:07.3 | Like, it's going to, we're going to get through it. |
| 1:10.0 | It's just about survival right and like working on |
| 1:13.5 | what comes after and i think we'll be okay yeah it's it's like we want to think the history is linear |
| 1:19.6 | and we learn from it but i mean you know we probably do a little bit but we keep coming back to |
| 1:26.1 | the same tropes over and over again. |
| 1:29.1 | Yeah. And I think that that's like, that's been something that's very important to remind |
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