Reading the Fourth

As we approach the day that commemorates American independence from British imperialism, it is worth remembering that the Patriots became the Redcoats over 100 years later. A year ago, I posted a list of nonfiction recommendations from my high school courses on American imperialism. One of those books is a must-read for everyone, especially Americans, and especially right now: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr.

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
Find out more about this book and other nonfiction recommendations from the Hallock classroom here.

It’s taken me a year to put something together on fiction, and the brief has shifted a bit in the process. I dig deep into why I loved this “children’s book” (grade 6 and up) and why it should be read by all ages. If you want to understand the Philippine-American War through a coming-of-age story mixed with a Things Fall Apart-theme, you have to try Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay.

Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay
Read more about why I love this book so much here.

And if you want to know more about the misuse of the Fourth of July in the Philippine context, read the post below. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

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Happy Fourth of July, Republic Day, Philippine-American Friendship Day, and Hallock wedding anniversary! (Yes, Mr. H and I married on American Independence Day because we enjoy irony.) Find out more.

Welcome to History Ever After!

This is the home of Jennifer Hallock, author of the Sugar Sun series. Whether you are a long-time fan of the larger Altarejos clan or just learned about the series through the Romancing the Past anthology, this website offers history and extras for everyone.

For Readers
Banner of full Sugar Sun series against background of Luneta Park, Manila, 1899.
Learn all about the Sugar Sun series epic family saga set at the beginning of the twentieth century. Don’t know where to start? Check out this page. (And the short answer is anywhere: all are interconnected-yet-standalone happily-ever-afters!)
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On this guidance page, you can find book-by-book breakdowns, a short discussion of accuracy, and some general notes on heat level.
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Read what people are saying about the Sugar Sun series!
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Sign up for the Sugar Sun series newsletter. Don’t miss a sale or new release! Sent quarterly, mostly.
I have written a lot of history on this blog—no surprise since it is my day job. Here are links to the most relevant posts, complete with illustrations.
Want to learn more about the setting of the Sugar Sun series? Click on any of the graphics of this page, or explore the maps of the Philippines & Manila at the bottom of the post.
Here is an alphabetical listing of the Sugar Sun glossary terms. Simply click on the graphic of your choice to open the annotated post in a new window. This list will be updated to include new terms as their posts are written.
For Writers
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I have collected a slew of tools that I use regularly to enhance my character and setting development. This includes everything from how different height characters would look kissing to what the sky above them would really look like at night. I did not program these tools, but I have gathered them in one place for you.
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I was honored to be able to present my research and ideas about the fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fiction at the 2018 IASPR conference in Sydney, Australia. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy.
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Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books.
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Who likes to read about average? No one! We want to read about the outliers, the dangerous, the obscure, the interesting! Part of what authors are selling is the chance to live someone else’s life for a little while. Read about how micro-history can help authors offer exactly that.
For Both
Find out more about the author and what people are saying about the series in my full media kit.

 

If there is something you are looking for that is not covered by one of these banners, please use the search box to the left to find it. You can also find several ways to contact me. Thank you for reading, and here’s wishing you a History Ever After!

 

The Grand Reopening of Hotel Oriente

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I am excited to announce that the Hotel Oriente is open after a pretty thorough remodel: better pacing, more hotel tidbits, and—best of all—brunch!

Welcome to the grand reopening of the Hotel Oriente! I am thrilled to finally rerelease this expanded, revised novella. I dedicate the much-needed buffet scene addition to my Sydney brunch buddies: Mina V. Esguerra, founder of the #romanceclass creator community, and Kat Mayo, founder of BookThingo. Fellow foodies, I am sorry it took me so long.
From the author’s note of the revised edition.

BUT WAIT! If you have not read Hotel Oriente yet, I have an amazing deal for you. You can grab it and nine more books in the Romancing the Past anthology for almost nothing. Yes, all ten swoony romances for the low price of 99¢ until September 15th, and only $4.99 after that.

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Grab all ten swoony romances, including the rerelease of Hotel Oriente, in one amazing anthology. Romancing the Past is available at all major retailers.
More from the Author’s Note of the 2021 Revision of Hotel Oriente:

Let’s dig into the history. Yes, the Hotel de Oriente did exist, though it was known by many spellings. Hotel de Oriente was the name plastered across the exterior molding, but I found all the following used: Hotel Oriente, Hotel d’Oriente, Hotel el Oriente, Hotel Orient, and every one of these in reverse order. It was the place to stay until the Insular Government purchased it in November 1903 to use as the headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary.

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Learn about the troubled, faded glory Hotel Oriente in the center of Manila, the Pearl of the Orient.

Many photos exist of the exterior of the building, and Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar has even built a working reconstruction and conference center in Bataan, which I have visited. Other than a few room photos, though, the interior is known only from traveler’s reports, including those on Lou Gopal’s Manila Nostalgia blog, as well as a variety of journals in the public domain. From these, I borrowed the complaints over “missing” mattresses and excessive egg dishes. I borrowed the bathtub incident from my father-in-law, who managed an American military hotel in Bangkok during the late 1960s.

Left: The Hotel de Oriente and me! Right: The view out our hotel window to the heritage bahay na bato across the square. Parts of Heneral Luna were filmed here at Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar.

A real assistant manager of the Oriente was implicated in the true scandal that almost engulfed Moss and Seb. Captain Frederick J. Barrows, the actual quartermaster of Southern Luzon, stole one hundred grand a month for almost a full year, pocketing nearly $1.2 million by 1901 (the equivalent of $38 million in 2020). This was nowhere near the largest war profiteering in world history—that honor goes to reconstruction contracts during the Iraq War—but it is still a lot of money. A court-martial sentenced Barrows to five years in Bilibid Prison, and that may have been getting off easy. He had a better chance at a fair trial inside the military than out of it. This was true for all civilians, Filipino or American. The Insular Cases, a series of 1901 decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, were the true legal architecture of empire, and they said that the Constitution did not follow the flag. I pushed forward the date of these decisions for my story, but only by a few months.

Contemporary accounts of the quartermaster scandal in Manila, along with the destination of the guilty: Bilibid Prison.

Much of Della’s article on the scandal is reproduced from the Los Angeles Herald’s April 1st issue, no joke. Please consider this acknowledgment my endnote for “Far Reaching Frauds in Army Commissary,” from page one. I used as much of the original wording as I could because I wanted Della’s writing to match the standards of the profession in 1901. The previous edition of this novella did not do a good job of displaying her talents as a journalist.

An advertisement from the 1901 Commercial Directory of Manila and a close up of an 1898 map of Manila and suburbs.

Della’s story was inspired by a deaf voyager, memoirist, and teacher named Annabelle Kent. While I was researching Under the Sugar Sun, I found a terrific description of a steamer’s rough entrance into Manila Bay. Kent’s Round the World in Silence proved her to be a thrill-seeking woman impervious to seasickness. (According to later U.S. Navy experiments, those with a damaged vestibular system are less likely to suffer from the bucking motion of the waves.) She circumnavigated the globe, mostly with strangers who did not speak American Sign Language. To me, Kent had the perfect spirit to infuse a romance heroine.

Deaf education in the Gilded Age
Take a peek inside deaf education in the Gilded Age with heroine Della Berget, modeled on real-life adventuress, Annabelle Kent. Find out more.

People say to “write what you know,” which is excellent advice—but plot bunnies lead me down precarious burrows. Could a deaf writer have better written about Della Berget? No doubt. Are there better books out there about Deaf Culture? Every single one written by someone who identifies as hard of hearing to profoundly Deaf. But I took a risk and wrote Della as best I could. This meant research: the Limping Chicken blog and the Gallaudet University archives were especially helpful. Of course, all mistakes or errors are entirely mine. At the time, the U.S. Congress required Gallaudet to teach only the “Oral Method” of communication, which is why she speechreads instead of speaking ASL. Della does not yet know other deaf people in her corner of Manila—she is new to the city—so there is not enough treatment of Deaf Culture and its rewards in this story, nor would I be the best person to translate such ideas to the page.

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Two photos of the “sleeping machine” at the Hotel de Oriente from the Burton Holmes Travelogue.

Moss is also loosely based on an actual person: West G. Smith, the American manager who ran the hotel for Ah Gong, proprietor. West Smith became Moss North? His wife Stella became Della? Yes, I amuse myself. Smith arrived with the Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteers and stayed to manage the Oriente, but the rest of Moss’s personal history was entirely fiction. Also, I liked the name and story behind the White Elephant resort in Nantucket, but it has no relation to Moss’s uncle’s hotel, which was instead based on the Windsor in St. Paul.

Hughes Holt’s background was a fictionalized conflation of the two West Virginian congressmen of the era, but his personality hews closer to Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, an orator who built a career on the embrace of overseas expansion. Beveridge did visit the Philippines—albeit two years earlier, in May of 1899—so that he could “understand the situation” (his words) before assuming his seat in the Senate. Unlike Holt, Beveridge impressed local soldiers with his physical endurance and ability to withstand deprivation. Like Holt, he left the islands more imperialist than ever. Emboldened, the U.S. Army would wage a relentless war, and so would privateers. The anecdote about violent American outlaws in Pampanga was ripped from page six of the 15 May 1901 issue of the New York Times.

Menu excerpts from the Hotel Oriente, 1900-1902. The top three are each relevant to a different scene from either Hotel Oriente or Under the Sugar Sun. IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR, HERE IS YOUR REWARD: Be the first to identify at least one of these scenes and I will gift you an e-copy of my upcoming novella—on Rosa’s redemption—once it is released. Enter by commenting on this post below.

Though Moss’s anti-imperialist attitudes were rare among soldiers, his concerns can be found in archived letters, newspapers, and Senate testimony. It was Major General Smedley Butler, USMC—two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor and veteran of the Philippine-American War—who wrote War is a Racket in 1935. He claimed that his three-plus decades of service had been “conducted for the benefit of the very few [commercial and oil interests], at the expense of the very many.”

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How much of Roosevelt’s reputation was fake news? And who had really saved his hide in Cuba? Read more about African American heroes of the Spanish-American War.

It did not take as long for others to see the light. Soldiers of African American regiments related the injustice of imperialism with contemporary clarity. Sergeant Major John W. Calloway of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was persecuted views he expressed only in private correspondence. Calloway was especially close to Filipino physician Torderica Santos, much like Moss was best friends with the fictional Judge Eusebio Lopa (inspired by the real Lieutenant Salvador G. Lara). Calloway also made his life in the Philippines after the war, marrying and raising fourteen children.

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Read more about why cocaine for surgery and heroin from the Sears Catalog was actually a step up for the history of medicine.

That brings me to Moss’s use of a condom, which was based on the state of contraception at the turn of the twentieth century. I do not know how hard it would have been to purchase a sheath in Manila, but it may have been easier there than in the United States. The 1873 Comstock Act had made it illegal to distribute birth control or information about birth control through the mail or across state lines, not imperial ones. Yes, the Philippines was a majority Catholic country, but papal pronouncements did not ban “artificial contraception” until 1930. Did Della understand what the condom was? It was possible, given the close contact she had with married friends at her university. Also, hearing people tended to be indiscreet around her, often to their own detriment.

Thanks for getting this far. Remember that your honest review helps readers find books they love. If you have taken the time to rate and review on Goodreads or the retailer of your choice, thank you. For everyone, I hope you enjoyed Moss and Della’s story. Here’s wishing you a History Ever After!

Banner of full Sugar Sun series against background of Luneta Park, Manila, 1899.