Captain Jinks, Hero

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for a rollicking, if deeply unsettling, tour through the jingoistic heart of late 19th-century America! Ernest Howard Crosby's *Captain Jinks, Hero* introduces us to the titular Jinks, a man whose earnest, if utterly misguided, pursuit of the 'perfect soldier' ideal drags him through the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion. This isn't just a military romp; it's a pointed, often hilarious, skewering of the industrial and media machinery that churned out consent for imperial conquest. Jinks's companion, the yellow journalist Cleary, is a master class in how sensationalism fuels the war machine, dutifully crafting narratives that would make today's propagandists blush.