America and Spain: Empire, Florida, and 1898
Spain was the first European power in much of what became the United States, and the last to be pushed out of the hemisphere by it. Its presence runs from the oldest city in the country through the place names of the Southwest, and the American relationship with Spain is a long arc from inheritance to rivalry to conquest — ending in 1898 with the United States dismantling the remains of the Spanish empire.
This guide follows that arc: Spanish colonial America, the borderlands and the cession of Florida, and the war of 1898 that ended Spanish power in the Americas. Each entry links to a full account.
Spain's American story began long before the United States did. While the English were still a generation from Jamestown, Spanish explorers and missionaries had already reached Florida and the Southwest and founded the first permanent European settlement on the continent. These entries set the stage: the age of exploration that brought Spain north, and the city that proves how early it arrived.
As the young United States grew, it pressed against the edges of a fading Spanish empire. Florida was the flashpoint — a Spanish possession Spain could no longer hold and the United States was determined to have. The treaty that settled it transferred Florida north and, in the bargain, drew the first American boundary line all the way to the Pacific.
The long relationship ended in a short war. In 1898 the United States went to war with Spain over Cuba and, in a matter of months, swept away the last of Spain's empire in the Americas and the Pacific. It was the moment Spain's four-century presence in the hemisphere ended — and the moment the United States became an imperial power in its own right.
The 1898 war announced the United States as an imperial power — a turn that echoes through America and China and the wider story of America's wars.