The Philippine-American War has rarely been analyzed from the Filipino viewpoint. As a consequence, Filipino military activity is little known or misunderstood. This study aims to shed light on the Filipino side of the conflict. It does so by utilizing the Philippine Insurgent Records, which are the records of the Philippine government. More importantly, the thesis examines 300 years of Filipino history, starting with the Spanish conquest, in order to provide a framework for understanding Philippine military culture.

Between 1898 and 1913, the limited manpower and resources of the United States Army forced it to employ thousands of Cubans and inhabitants of the Philippines to fight the Spanish and Philippine-American and Moro Wars and conduct civil administration in Cuba and the Philippines. The colonial military labor of Cubans and Philippine islanders both affirmed and challenged the claims of American political and military leaders that the United States practiced a liberal and benevolent form of colonial and neo-colonial rule. In the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, the U.S. army's exploitation of ordinary colonial subjects breathed new life into often coercive colonial institutions, such as Chinese migrant contract labor, forced labor for public works such as roads, and the impressment of interpreters and guides and other intermediaries for military operations. The impact of American military labor relations in war and occupation endured well into periods of civilian rule in these countries, shaping the politics of race and immigration, infrastructure development and public obligation, and the civil apparatus of colonial and neo-colonial states.

This creative project’s ambition is to craft an original novel called The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner. The Dreams of Metanoia is initially influenced by The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a true narrative by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta and her family were subjected to Jim Crow scientific racism. Henrietta, a black woman with cervical cancer, had her cells removed and cultivated by John Hopkins doctors without any consent. The doctors discovered that Henrietta’s cells continued to divide relentlessly outside her body. They then sold them to other researchers without their knowledge. However, the gap in literature occurs within a mysterious hallucination that happened within the nonfiction narrative. Henrietta’s cousin, Hector Henry, had a hallucination that may be connected to the obscure Philippine-American War and Filipino Folklore. The Philippine-American War was a somber conflict of racism and white American imperialism from 1899-1902. It is a war shrouded from most American textbooks; it was a war that tested American soldier’s ethical morality and allegiance to a 20th century Jim Crow United States. It is a war where enemies found a common strife within their woes. Because of how unknown these narratives are in today’s racial and politically divided world, it is essential to review and learn from these tragedies that united races as humans rather than individual racial identities. This research aims to repurpose these narratives to craft an original story relevant to modern America’s racial strife. Thus, The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner is an original piece that seeks to find the intersectionality in the meaning of being human.

Many scholars have written about the counterinsurgency phase of the Philippine- American War (1899-1902). Military historians often downplayed the impact of human rights abuses, while emphasizing the success of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency instead. In contrast, social historians frequently focused on human rights abuses at the expense of understanding the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency efforts. Unlike the majority of earlier works, this thesis unifies military, social, and legal history to primarily answer these questions: what significant factors led U.S. soldiers to commit human rights abuses during the war, and at what cost did the U.S. pacify the Filipino rebellion? The war was successfully waged at the tactical, operational, and strategic level, but wavered at the grand strategic level.1 This study argues that racism, ambiguous rules and regulations, and a breakdown of discipline contributed to U.S. soldiers committing human rights abuses against Filipinos during the counterinsurgency. Primary sources from the perspectives of American policy makers, military leaders, and common soldiers—in addition to documents on U.S. Army regulations and its past traditions—reveal a comprehensive story of what happened during this conflict. The U.S. Army’s abuse were not a historical anomaly, but a growing trend extending from nineteenth century conflicts against other races. The counterinsurgency revealed that beneath the stated principles of 1 For the purposes of this thesis, grand strategy is “the direction and use made of any and all of the assets of a security community, including its military instruments, for the purposes of policy as decided by politics.” This differs from the strategic level of war, which is the direction and exclusive use of military forces for the purposes of policy as decided by politics. Finally, the operational level is the level of war where the tasks, decided by strategy, are coordinated and individual units are commanded. These units, in turn, engaging in tactics to achieve operational objectives. Colin S. Gray, The Future of Strategy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 29, 47. iii America’s benevolent mission, violent racial underpinnings existed in U.S. desires for global and domestic hegemony. The U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency resulted in a flawed victory, won at the cost of combatants, innocent civilians, and American idealism. / History

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 M44 / Master of Arts

Among the most important choices made by groups fighting a civil war -- governments and rebels alike -- is how to allocate available military and pecuniary resources across the contested areas of a conflict-ridden territory. Combatants use military force to coerce and money to persuade and co-opt. A vast body of literature in political science and security studies examines how and where combatants in civil wars apply violence. Scholars, however, have devoted less attention to combatants' use of material inducements to attain their objectives. This dissertation proposes a logic that guides combatants' use of material benefits alongside military force in pursuit of valuable support from communities in the midst of civil war. Focused on the interaction between the military and the local population, the theory envisions a bargaining process between a commander and a community whose support he seeks. The outcome of the bargaining process is a fiscal strategy defined by the extent to which material benefits are distributed diffusely or targeted narrowly. That outcome follows from key characteristics of the community in question that include its sociopolitical solidarity (or fragmentation) and its economic resilience (or vulnerability). I evaluate the theory of fiscal strategies through a series of case studies from the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. As a further test of external validity, I consider the theory's applicability to key events from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. / Government

Oregon volunteer soldiers fought two wars in the Philippines from 1898 to 1899, one against the Spanish colonial government (from May to August 1898), and one against the Philippine insurgency (beginning in February of 1899). This thesis examines the connections between Oregonians' racial characterization of Filipinos and their beliefs about the wars' purposes and moral characteristics. The source material is drawn from the personal papers of Oregon volunteer soldiers and from the Portland Oregonian.

During the Philippine War, 1899 – 1902, America attempted to quell an uprising from the Filipino people. Four regular army regiments of black soldiers, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry served in this conflict. Alongside the regular army regiments, two volunteer regiments of black soldiers, the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth, also served. During and after the war these regiments received little attention from the press, public, or even historians. These black regiments served in a variety of duties in the Philippines, primarily these regiments served on the islands of Luzon and Samar. The main role of these regiments focused on garrisoning sections of the Philippines and helping to end the insurrection. To carry out this mission, the regiments undertook a variety of duties including scouting, fighting insurgents and ladrones (bandits), creating local civil governments, and improving infrastructure. The regiments challenged racist notions in America in three ways. They undertook the same duties as white soldiers. They interacted with local "brown" Filipino populations without fraternizing, particularly with women, as whites assumed they would. And, they served effectively at the company and platoon level under black officers. Despite the important contributions of these soldiers, both socially and militarily, little research focuses on their experiences in the Philippines. This dissertation will discover and examine those experiences. To do this, each regiment is discussed individually and their experiences used to examine the role these men played in the Philippine War. Also addressed is the role ideas about race played in these experiences. This dissertation looks to answer whether or not notions on race played a major role in the activities of these regiments. This dissertation will be an important addition to the study of the Philippine War, the segregated U. S. Army, and African American history in the modern period.

This thesis is an annotated and edited typescript of a primary source, the handwritten diary of Chriss A. Bell, of the Second Oregon Volunteer Infantry state militia. The diary concerns the events of Oregon's National Guard state militia in the Spanish-American war in the Philippines, and the Philippine Insurrection that followed. The period of time concerned is from the beginning of May, 1898 to the end of June, 1899.

The history of the United States’ occupation in the Philippines requires an alternative archive that includes family stories, museums sites, and other memories to articulate the nearly inexplicable legacy of imperial trauma. My project foregrounds the intangible effects of American imperialism, traced in generational memories of Filipinos and Filipino Americans and their descendants. Addressing three key moments defining the Filipino and Filipino American experience: the Philippine-American War, World War II, and 21st century global capitalism, I look at how the under-the-surface, banal nature of imperial trauma’s legacy marks Filipino identity and creates blind spots in the Filipino imaginary. My dissertation examines sexual atrocities committed by American soldiers during the 1898-1902 Philippine-American War, revisits memories of World War II and the Japanese Occupation as represented in military museums in Fredericksburg, Texas and on Corregidor Island, Philippines, and concludes with the importance of the babaylan figure, from an ancient priestess tradition in the Philippines, for diasporic Filipinas to negotiate the contemporary challenges of everyday living. My dissertation examines the use of strategic storytelling to recover lost histories, heal from the past, and re-create the present. / text