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The tasks of the fleet mustered to invest the Cuban ports and convey the troops of the United States to their attack upon the island were by no means so simple. The coasts of the long island had many ports; it was presently known that Spanish squadron of four armored cruisers and three torpedo-boat destroyers, under Admiral Pascual Cervera, had left the Cape Verde Islands for the West Indies; it was possible to do little more than guess what port they would make for. —from Chapter III: “The End of a Century” Before he served as the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921, before he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, THOMAS WOODROW WILSON (1856–1924) was a lawyer and an academic: a university professor of history and politics, and president of Princeton University. It was during his tenure at Princeton that he penned this five-volume history of the United States, and it reflects many of the biases he later brought to national politics, from racial prejudice to anti-immigration attitudes. In Volume V, Wilson brings the story of the nation up to the moment of its 1902 publication, from the challenges of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War through the renewal of the economic powerhouse of the Northeast and the impact a burgeoning immigrant population was having on the country, and finally to war with Spain over Cuba in the late 1890s. This volume also includes the general index for the five-volume set. This beautiful replica of the first edition features all the original halftone illustrations. Students of Wilson and of the ever-changing lens through which history is told and retold will find this an enlightening and illuminating work.