Why The Maine Sank

At 9:40 PM on the night of February 15th ,1898, the United States’ battleship, the USS Maine, exploded in Havana Harbor due to an unknown cause, and killed over 250 soldiers and officers boarded on the vessel. The explosion of the Maine was conceived as a horrific event in United States history that gave the capital-driven government of the U.S. the opportunity to expand into the Pacific Ocean and also establish a stronger control over the Caribbean. The sinking of the USS Maine was used to further the United States imperialistic goals through the fabrication of stories involving how the Maine sank, the manipulation of the U.S. public via the use of yellow journalism and the exploitation of the United States nationalistic ideals. Before the

When a coal engine is operational, it produces smoke that is laced with coal dust. With most ships that are powered by a coal engine, they need people to constantly clean up all of the coal dust that accumulates on the ship to prevent fire hazards. It could be assumed that there was a fire caused by this coal dust, but this is unlikely. However, according to the documentary “Remember the Maine”, one must consider that electricity was a new commodity on battleships. The functionality of this new technology was unreliable at best due to it being discovered only a few years before. The Maine was one of the first ironclad vessels that the United States had created that had a source of electricity (“Remember the Maine”). Fire alarms and smoke detectors could have failed to warn the men aboard the Maine that the threat of a fire existed and it would have led to ammunition catching fire and

These giants of the media world were hard at work using a system of writing called, yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is a writing style that tried as hard as possible to sell Americans the idea that the Spanish were ruthless tyrants and that the people of Cuba suffered under their rule (“U.S. Diplomacy”). Yellow journalism also reached into other global topics, however, most of the stories were targeted at Cuba. Its power came from it’s innate ability to exploit the prejudices that already existed in American society (“U.S. Diplomacy”). This is why writers like Pulitzer and Hearst sensationalized their stories, enhancing the flow of hatred toward the Spanish and eventually causing the Spanish American