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

In 1902, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the end of the war, and issued a full pardon to combat participants. 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, on May 23, 1901, visited San Francisco to break ground for the monument. This is how important the war was to the United States of America and to San Francisco. 

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."