Cuba in War Time (Forerunners)

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world.

Initially published in 1897, Cuba in War Time brought readers onto the battlefields with a style that was urgent, immersive, and unmistakably modern. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his generation, filed vivid, morally charged dispatches, capturing everything from Spanish atrocities to the execution of a young Cuban rebel, and helped transform frontline reporting into a new literary form and a potent political force. Davis’s work helped ignite public support for the Spanish-American War, and his account of the Battle of San Juan Hill turned a young Theodore Roosevelt into a national hero. Yet his work often blurred the line between fact and spectacle, revealing how easily journalism could be swept into the causes it chronicled.

This edition reexamines Davis’s legacy with a searching new introduction by Peter Maass, a celebrated war reporter himself. A foundational text in the history of American media, Cuba in War Time remains as gripping and unsettling as the events it describes.

The complete Forerunners series:

• Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks; with an introduction by Brooke Kroeger
• Cuba in War Time, by Richard Harding Davis; with an introduction by Peter Maas
• Race Adjustment, by Kelly Miller; with an introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway
• Drift and Mastery, by Walter Lippmann; with an introduction by Nicholas Lemann

Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) was the most prominent American correspondent of his era, covering the Spanish-American War, Second Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, and World War I. He helped shape public support for US intervention in Cuba and later served as managing editor of Harper’s Weekly. He also published a wide range of popular novels, plays, short stories, and travel books, including Soldiers of Fortune, Gallegher and Other Stories, and Notes of a War Correspondent.

Peter Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, which won a Los Angeles Times book prize and the Overseas Press Club’s book prize, and Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s award for excellence in journalism. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he has written about war, media, and national security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Intercept.