| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Seelye. War Games: Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 341. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.95.
The so-called "yellow journalists" have played a prominent role in accounts of what is still mistakenly referred to as the Spanish-American instead of the Cuban-Spanish-American War. The best known of the war correspondents was probably Richard Harding Davis, who reported on the events in Cuba for the London Times, the New York Herald, and Scribner's, and, on returning to the United States, published a book based on his dispatches.	1
There was no one quite like Davis, a dashing figure of a man, immaculately outfitted for every occasion, even war, and seemingly at ease wherever he might be, in the Palm Room at the Waldorf or with the Rough Riders at the battle at La Guásimas. Davis, arguably the first celebrity journalist, is almost forgotten today. It is to be hoped that John Seelye's book, which follows by a decade Arthur Lubow's masterful biography, will rescue Davis—and his writings—from sinking any further into oblivion.	2
Davis's forte was as an eyewitness reporter who, no matter who was paying him, spoke his own mind and recorded in articles, travel books, and fiction his often idiosyncratic, always wittily ironic impressions of the places and people he encountered. Whatever the genre, he saw everything through a distorting romantic lens. Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott provided him with the "model for a new kind of romantic fiction" and a new style of journalism, in which men who looked and acted as he did, who were young, idealistic, well dressed, and well educated acted the heroes in an American "version of the imperial game" (p. 31).	. . .

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