War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

In searing and well-researched prose, former New York assemblyman and El Diario editorial director Denis covers a much-neglected side of U.S. imperialist and colonial practice in Puerto Rico. From the Spanish-American War in the 1890s to a failed and bloody revolution on the island in 1950, in which the U.S. Army deployed 5,000 troops and bombarded two towns—the only time in history that America has bombed its own citizens—the events chronicled will strike a chord with Puerto Rican and Latin American history students and enthusiasts. Recounting Nationalist hero Pedro Albizu Campos's last tortured days in the filthy, inhumane La Princesa prison and the botched plan to assassinate President Harry Truman at the Blair House in Washington, DC, the author presents decades' worth of interviews, public records, and personal documents. The historical account he adeptly weaves unabashedly reveals the government's racist and often predatory actions toward its Caribbean colony.