Covering The Spanish-American War in Cuba
During the Spanish-American War of 1898, Kathleen Blake volunteered to go to Cuba to cover the battle activity at the front. The Toronto Mail sent her to Cuba, exploiting the opportunity to garner sensationalist publicity. However, she was told by her supervisors to write features and “guff,” as she called it, not the news from the front, apparently believing that this would not be appropriate for a woman. She received her war correspondent accreditation from the United States government, thus becoming the first accredited woman war correspondent in the world.
She was authorized to accompany American troops, but was vehemently opposed by other correspondents and the military authorities, who nearly succeeded in keeping her stranded in Florida. Blake persevered and arrived in Cuba in July 1898, just before the end of the war. Her accounts of the aftermath of the war and of its human casualties were the peak of her journalism career and made her famous. On her way back to Canada, Kathleen stopped in Washington where she addressed the International Press Union of Women Journalists.
Read more about this topic: Kit Coleman
Famous quotes containing the words covering the, covering, war and/or cuba:
“You had to have seen the corpses lying there in front of the school—the men with their caps covering their faces—to know the meaning of class hatred and the spirit of revenge.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin—preludes, etudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)