Thanks to independence movements that swept across Latin America, the once-powerful Spanish Empire found itself stripped of nearly all its colonies by the end of the nineteenth century. Efforts by rebels to secure their freedom in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and the Philippines during the mid-1890s threatened to shrink Spain’s empire ever further, which resulted in increasingly harsh measures by Spanish authorities to retain possession of both. Atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, including the construction of concentration camps, roused great anger among the American people, who were following unfolding events in newspapers that occasionally altered events on the island or fabricated them all together to keep circulation numbers high.