MC Canlas, the SoMa Pilipinas Community Historian, and Abraham Ignacio, Filipino American Center Librarian at SFPL in conversation and historical discourse.

Watch on YouTube.

In 1902, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the end of the war. That same year, a 95-foot tall column was erected in Union Square to honor Admiral Dewey's 1898 victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay.

President William McKinley himself, visited San Francisco to break ground for the monument, illustrating the importance of the war to the United States. 

Unfortunately, most Americans only remember the Spanish-American War (April 21 – August 13, 1898), while a fifteen-year war in the Philippines was erased from people's memory, not only among Americans but also Filipinos. Forgetting was officially sanctioned. As Daniel Immerwahr highlighted in the introduction of his book, How to Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States, "One of the truly distinctive features of the United States' empire is how persistently ignored it has been." It is long overdue to reveal this imperial war.