In 1873, the capture of a private American vessel, the Virginius, by a Cuban warship almost brought the United States and Spain to war. The Spanish warship the Tornado seized the Virginius as it ran arms and ammunition to Cuban revolutionaries attempting to claim independence from Spain; fifty-three members of the shipâs crew were put to death by Spanish authorities in Cuba. A widespread popular reaction to this incident, termed the Virginius Affair, swept through the United States while newspapers and citizens agitated for war against Spain. Although the U.S. did not go to war against Spain in 1873, the Virginius Affair had lasting consequences on the three overlapping fields of U.S. Spanish Relations, American politics, and the outcome of the Cuban revolution of 1868-1878, often called the Ten Years War. Historians of these three fields, however, have consistently overlooked the Virginius Affair due to limitations within each of their disciplines that obscure the importance of international politics and non-state actors in affecting history. In order to move past this type of restrictive analysis this paper uses a microhistorical approach to contextualize the Virginius Affair in international politics, following the small and individual actions of Americans, Spaniards, and Cubans localized through the study of the two central ships in the conflict: the Virginius and the Tornado. The long and fraught histories of these two ships reveal the deep networks that connected the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century as well as demonstrating the importance of contingency in shaping history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07152016-140340 |
| Date | 26 July 2016 |
| Creators | Romero, Eulogio Kyle |
| Contributors | Paul A. Kramer, Celso Castilho |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07152016-140340/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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