Massacre in the Clouds

Massacre in the Clouds reconstructs the assault on Bud Dajo in March 1906, when American troops attacked a fortified volcanic crater on Jolo in the southern Philippines during the Moro Rebellion. Wagner follows the decisions of Governor Leonard Wood and the military commanders on the ground, the presence of Moro families within the crater and the killing of hundreds of men, women and children, using a notorious photograph of the dead as a starting point for historical recovery.

The book then traces the controversy that followed in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt praised the action, while critics including Mark Twain and W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the language of victory used to describe it. Wagner shows how the massacre was gradually pushed to the margins of public memory and places it within the wider history of American colonial rule, counterinsurgency and the transfer of imperial practices from European empires to the United States.