In my historiography I talk about and compare and contrast my secondary sources. Towards the end I also detail the main argument within my topic. These sources really helped me answer the question of what US rule looked like. As with the primary sources though, I and other researchers need to find more Spanish perspectives. A Spanish perspective of what US rule was like would be very helpful. If I continue this project, thats one of the things I will look for.
So here it is:
For my project, I am analyzing how the US captured Guam in 1898 and what happened afterward. Specifically, how the US governed Guam afterwards. It is important to talk about this topic, especially in the US, because Guam is a US territory. However, the island gets left out of a lot of discussion about the war and I can think of a couple reasons why. One is that no battles were fought on the island, but the second is that because Spain was our enemy, there are not a lot of documents in US archives from the Spanish perspective. My goal is to get people talking about the island and to teach people more about it.
My project also looks at how the US Government governed Guam in the years after the capture. I did not originally start out with this idea but as I got more into the project, I noticed how this topic is also not talked about a lot. For example, in the aftermath section on the Capture of Guam Wikipedia page, there was really no information and I needed to add details about what happened in the following years.
One article is by Stephen Kinzer and it is an in-depth analysis of what happened during the capture and how it transpired. The article provides extremely good detail about what happened on that day. It talks about how the US sailors and troops got the island to surrender and the immediate reactions of the Spanish personnel. The author’s main argument is that what happened after the US took Guam was disturbing. The author states this pretty early on: “Guam remains a colonial ward of the U.S. Navy, and no show case for either democracy or native rights” (Kinzer 100). One thing the author is sure to point out is that right after the war, the US set up a system where the commander of Guam Naval Base would also be the governor of the island. The author then states the reaction of the people of Guam to this information: “Protests against this system began in 1901” (Kinzer 102). This article is very important for my project because of how much information it gives, not only on the capture, but also about what happened after.
Stephen Kinzer is an American historian who had previously worked for the New York Times. This source fits in really nicely with the whole project because it talks about everything, not just one thing. It goes into good detail on the events of the capture but it also summarizes what happened in the years after the capture. Sources two, three, and four go into detail about specific units or topics but this article covers it all and this is why it is a great starting point.
Another article, by Dwight Sullivan, is an analysis of the role the US Marines played in the capture of Guam. It provides very good detail about what the US Marines did. This source also gives a lot of back stories to the main characters like Lieutenant John T. Myers, who was in charge of the 30 Marine contingent on the USS Charleston. This article was really helpful for my project because it added good information, like the fact that there were 233 sailors on the USS Charleston during the capture (Sullivan 6), that’s hard to find elsewhere. Another great thing that this article does is it shows a map of Guam, which is very handy because after reading some of these stories, the reader starts to think that Guam is a small island but the map makes clear that Guam is not. I could not find an argument in this article; this article is more of a story of what happened. While Kinzer’s article, my first source, talks about what happened during the capture of Guam, this article talks about what happened in the days leading up to the capture and goes into great detail about a specific unit involved during the capture. Dwight Sullivan is a former US Marine Officer who now focuses on and studies law and military history.
Another article, by Alfred Flores, that I looked at was about what education was like in Guam following the US takeover. This article surprisingly did not mention too much related to the US takeover, but it was a good summary of what the US-run education on the island looked like. It states that from 1899 to 1950 the US Navy was in charge of education (Flores 3)—the US Navy was in charge of really everything on the island during that time. The article is split up into many sections and each section talks about different subjects that the US Navy taught in the schools. Each section gives a good summary and some good in-the-weeds details about what the subject what like. Some subjects and topics included English Training, Health and Sanitation Training, and Vocational Training. During Vocational Training, “boys were being prepared for work outside the home” and girls for work mostly inside the home (Flores 6). The article does not really have a large argument, however it does hint that the author thinks the US Navy did not treat the natives fairly: “The marginalization of Chamorros as teachers-only allowed the US Navy to control school curriculum and policies” (Flores 3). Chamorros is the name of a group of Guam natives. This article really helps my project because as I said, I want to learn more about what happened after the US takeover. This article provides a good perspective about that topic. Alfred Flores teaches at Harvey Mudd College as an associate professor of Asian American Studies. He has written many articles that have been published in top US journals. This source fits really well with my fourth source, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 by Lanny Thompson, because this source goes in-depth about what US Navy provided education looked like on Guam. Lanny Thompson’s book tells us that the US Navy was in charge of things like education but does not go into detail about what that looked like. This source does and it’s a nice addition to Thompson’s book.
My last source is a book by Lanny Thompson about US Imperialism. Each chapter is a different angle looking at US Imperialism: one chapter is about the legal foundations, one is about strategies, and another is about Guam. Those three are examples but there are many more. As one might expect, I am going to be looking at the Guam chapter. The Guam chapter starts off by detailing the “first official report for the secretary of the navy” (Thompson 227). The report focused on Guam as a naval station and how to get the island ready to house a naval station. The first section of the report focused on how to improve the health of the population and the second was about provisioning food and labor in terms of the naval station. However, the argument of this chapter comes from the second section of the Chapter where the author talks about how the US denied self-government to the people of Guam. The author states very clearly, “the argument that the population of Guam did not desire civil government was clearly inaccurate” (Thompson 237). The author then talks about how governing a people was new to the US Navy and they needed to figure out how to do it. This book fits well in my project because it is all about how the US ran Guam after taking it over. This work goes well with my first source, Cruel Realities: The American Conquest of Guam by Stephen Kinzer, because they both talk about how the people of Guam wanted self-government and how the US government denied that. The source talks more about what transpired in respect to self-government in the long run, whereas the Stephen Kinzer article only talks about what happened in the short term. Lanny Thompson was a professor of Archipelagic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico and is now retired.
This is a good segue into the main debate that I see. The debate I see that comes from these sources is the question of if the people of Guam wanted self-government. For example, in the fourth source the author states, “the argument that the population of Guam did not desire civil government was clearly inaccurate” (Thompson 237). However, in some of the other sources the I find that the author hints at the opposite. No source says outright, ‘the people did not want self-government’ but some authors hint at that. I also saw this idea in some of the sources that I cut. Another debate is why the Spanish abandoned the island before the war. In many sources the reader will see that the authors say that the last letter the government of Guam got from the Spanish military or government was a few months before the war. It was also said that the island had no more ammunition when US ships arrived. This begs the question as to why the Spanish Government abandoned the island. Many authors tried to think of reasons, as with the first debate: the authors never stated outright what they thought; but they hinted at it.
All in all, these sources provide a really good picture as to what happened. My primary sources are mostly about something specific that happened but these sources take a good step back and provide good material. These sources help me answer my big questions of how the take over of Guam transpired and what US rule looked like.
Sources
Flores, Alfred P. “US Colonial Education in Guam, 1899–1950.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. (2019) https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.512
Kinzer, Stephen. “Cruel Realities: The American Conquest of Guam.” World Policy Journal 23, no. 2 (2006): 100–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40210023.
Sullivan, Dwight. “Pacific Conquest: The Marine Corps’ Role in the U.S. Acquisition of Guam.” Marine Corps History 10, no. 1 (2024): 5-24. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938018.
Thompson, Lanny. Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898. University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt6wqntn.