If you don't already have a lot of background on the Spanish American war, as well as on the situation in the Philippines and Cuba both before and after that conflict, you're going to have a hard time following this history. Jackson does a good job zooming in on the formative years after that conflict, but the pairing of Cuba and the Philippines is a bit strange given how radically different those regions were, and besides the racism of the American occupation there's very little connective tissue between the events there during this period. This book does an excellent job documenting the interactions between the US military and the different local and international actors in these areas, although without much of a thesis on what binds these events together it's more of a chronology than anything else. As a reference book, however, this book is extremely useful