From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, the United States extended its ideology of expansion and exceptionalism overseas, most famously in Cuba and the Philippines with the Spanish–American (1898) and Philippine–American (1899–1902) wars. While these interventions were debated in the United States, inspiring the American Anti-Imperialist League, they were also widely celebrated in newspapers in a jingoistic fashion. The latter ideology suggested that the freedom-loving United States was saving Cubans and Filipinos from the intolerably cruel and unjust Spanish, who were oppressing the Cuban and Filipino patriots striving for independence from Spain.