1. For two different accounts of this incident, see Jay Monaghan The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (New York: Bonanza, 1951), 3–33; and Don Russell The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 149–61. Although Russell claims that “nothing in the Buffalo Bill legend has been more exaggerated than Ned Buntline's part in it” (150), Buntline's novels and plays about Buffalo Bill certainly contributed to the construction of the legend.

Peter Buckley's unpublished 1984 doctoral dissertation, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), is still the best source for information on Buntline. See also Buckley, “The Case against Ned Buntline: The ‘Words, Signs, and Gestures’ of Popular Authorship,” Prospects 13 (1988): 249–72.

2. Richard Slotkin Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 87.

3. Ibid., 83, 86.

4. On Bowery B'hoys and G'hals, see Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 294–409; Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 81–88, 154, 160, 201, 207–8; Christine Stansell City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 89–101; and Sean Wilentz Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 300–301.

5. Lawrence Levine Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 68. Levine discusses the Astor Place riot as a symptom of an emerging high/low split within the public sphere and, more specifically, within the sphere of culture. For more

6. Lott, Love and Theft, 66, 67.

7. In Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), Edward Said defines imperialism as “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory” and colonialism as “the implanting of settlements on distant territory” (9). Although I might quibble with the use of the term “distant,” and though it's sometimes difficult to separate the two rigorously, I generally agree with Said's definitions of imperialism as territorial expansion and colonialism as (re)settlement. For some reflections on what the terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” might mean in a specifically U.S. context, see Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Diaspora 4, no. 2 (1995): 181–99 (thanks to David Kazanjian for bringing this article to my attention); Eva Cherniavsky, “Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame,” boundary 2 23, no. 2 (1996): 85–110; Arnold Krupat, “Postcoloniality and Native American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 1 (1994): 163–80; Gilbert Joseph, Catherine Legrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); and Said, Culture and Imperialism, 8–9, 282–96. See also the articles collected in the special issue “Imperialism—A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” of Radical History Review 57 (1993): 1–84.

8. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 13, 85.

9. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between city and empire in some of the popular literature of the nineteenth century, see Richard Slotkin The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). Slotkin suggests that “literary mythology” tries to mask “the internal social conflicts of the Metropolis by projecting class war outward into racial war on the borders” (51–52).

10. David Potter The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 16–17.

11. Michael Paul Rogin Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Her man Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), 103. Hereafter cited in text.

12. Scholars in Chicano and Latino Studies have addressed the significance of 1848 in a number of different ways. During the 1970s, the “internal colonialism” model was widely influential. For more on the internal colonialism model, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36–47. As Omi and Winant explain, the “internal colonialism” analogy emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was especially popular among “radical nationalist movements” that “rejected reform-oriented politics” and

For examples of the internal colonialism model in Chicano Studies, see Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 4th ed. (1972; New York: Longman, 2000); Mario Barrera et al., “The Barrio as Internal Colony,” in People and Politics in Urban Society, ed. Harlan Hahn (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1972); and Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). For a critique of that model, see Tomás Almaguer, “Ideological Distortions and Recent Chicano Historiography: The Internal Colonialism Model and Chicano Historical Interpretation,” Aztlan 18, no. 1 (spring 1987): 7–28. Almaguer identified five problems with this model. First, he argued that it gave “insufficient attention to both the significance of internal class stratification within the Mexican population before and after the United States–Mexico war” (11). He suggested that some historians who invoked this model, moreover, were silent about the “ranchero elite's treatment of the Indian population” (12). Second, he emphasized that “both Spain and later Mexico retained territorial claim to the South-west on the basis of their imposition or perpetuation of a colonial system predicated on their ruthless exploitation of the truly indigenous Indian population” (14). Third, he argued that because some Mexicans were defined as white and accorded citizenship status, they were not “subordinated to the same inferior legal-political status accorded others in classic colonial situations or to blacks and Indians at this historical juncture elsewhere in the United States” (15). Fourth, he pointed to the “profound differences” that existed among the experiences of different racial minorities (16). And finally, he suggested that there was a “major discontinuity between the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicano experiences,” since by the twentieth century the “ranchero class” had lost their land and new waves of immigrants experienced the “rapid proletarianization of the Mexican population” (24).

Clearly Almaguer was responding to a different moment (1987) in Chicano Studies, a moment when the “internal colonialism” model needed to be reconsidered. Since he wrote this essay, several significant books in the field of Chicano/Latino Studies have made 1848 an important period marker while remaining sensitive to the problems and questions that he describes. See Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Neil Foley The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); David Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); and

13. José David Saldívar Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 177.

14. Susan Lee Johnson's outstanding social history of the California Gold Rush was published just as I was finishing the final revision of this manuscript. Roaring Camp should become the standard work on the subject. For some insightful remarks about the Gold Rush and 1848, see Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000), 79–81, 95. See also Malcolm Rohrbough Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 216–29; Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 26–29; and Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

15. Donald C. Biggs Conquer and Colonize (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio, 1977).

16. On the participation of Mexican War veterans in the Caste War and on this conflict in general, see Gilbert Joseph, “The United States, Feuding Elites, and Rural Revolt in Yucatán, 1836–1915,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 178–91. See also Joseph, “From Caste War to Class War: The Historiography of Modern Yucatán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 1 (1985): 111–34; and Nelson Reed The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). On filibustering during this period, see Luis Martínez-Fernández Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), esp. 23; Tom Chaffin Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Charles Brown Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Robert E. May, “Young American Males and Filibustering in the Age of Manifest Destiny: The United States Army as a Cultural Mirror,” Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 863.

17. See Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires. Martínez-Fernández suggests that the “year 1848 stands out as a significant watershed in the course of international rivalries in the Hispanic Caribbean. Up to that point the policy of the United States in the region had been defensive. That year, however, the United States began to put forth a much more aggressive policy, particularly toward Cuba” (20). See also Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 272–97.

18. See Richard Slotkin Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 189–207; Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970), 1–12; Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,

19. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 13–102; Carol Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (November 1990): 13–98; Gary Anderson and Alan Wool-worth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1812 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988); and Roy W. Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

20. Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of Foreign Relations: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge, 1993), 53–54. LaFeber suggests that by the late 1880s the U.S. military had consolidated white power over the entire country, “and in the late 1890s white Americans were using this continental empire as a base from which to create a new empire of commerce and insular possessions in the Caribbean and across the Pacific Ocean.” As Amy Kaplan ably explains, during the 1890s “politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen on both sides of the debate were redefining national power as disembodied—that is, divorced from contiguous territorial expansion.” According to Kaplan, “[w]ith the end of continental expansion, national power was no longer measured by the settlement and incorporation of new territory consolidated by a united state, but by the extension of vaster yet less tangible networks of international markets and political influence.” Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (winter 1990): 662.

21. LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (1963; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), xxxii. Hereafter cited in text.

22. Charles Vevier, “American Continentalism: An Idea of Expansion, 1845–1910,” American Historical Review 65, no. 2 (1960): 323. When in the late nineteenth century anti-imperialists argued against the acquisition of lands “disconnected” from the continent, they sometimes implied that earlier expansion had been a natural and organic process; not imperialism at all but, as Albert Weinberg put it in a different context, “the irresistible movement of American population into undeveloped land” that was contiguous. Albert Weinberg Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1948), 198.

23. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 17.

24. Richard Stott Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3.

25. Kerby Miller Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280, 291.

26. Bruce Levine The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 1–82. According to Levine, almost “60,000 Germans arrived per year during the latter half of the 1840s” (15).

27. David Henkin City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 30. See also Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39.

28. Bruce Laurie Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 29.

29. Oscar Handlin Boston's Immigrants: A Study of Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 74–75; and Bridges, City in the Republic, 58.

30. Allan Pred Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4.

31. Henkin, City Reading, 107; Charles Sellers The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 369–72; Ronald Zboray A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Zboray, “Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 182–91; and Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 95–105.

32. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 95–101 ; and Henkin, City Reading, 105.

33. Sellers, Market Revolution, 370.

34. Bridges, City in the Republic, 21; Sellers, Market Revolution, 40–44.

35. Zboray, Fictive People, 55–82. Sellers notes that in the 1840s, “the United States almost trebled its railway network to 8,879 miles” (392).

36. Ibid., 75.

37. Henkin, City Reading, 105–6.

38. Pred, Urban Growth, 4.

39. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 107.

40. Ibid., 114–16.

41. Ibid., 299.

42. Laurie, Working People, 10.

43. Ibid., 29–30.

44. Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 74–75; Bridges, City in the Republic, 58. According to Handlin, the ready-made clothing industry, sugar refining, iron works, and shipbuilding were particularly affected (77–78).

45. Lott, Love and Theft, 4, 11. Lott's work is a good example of how a good deal of excellent American Studies scholarship still subsumes all other meanings and consequences of the events of 1848 within a national narrative of slavery and freedom. He argues, for instance, that “the minstrel show provided the soundtrack for the American 1848” (210), revealing “the political unconscious of Manifest Destiny” (203). The “racial repressed” that Lott uncovers, however, has little to do with U.S. imperialism, Mexico, immigrant workers, or international

46. Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.

47. Ibid., 76, 96.

48. Charles Bergquist Labor and the Course of American Democracy: U.S. History in Latin American Perspective (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 45–78.

49. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 1.

50. Ibid., 10.

51. For the later nineteenth century, see Saxton's outstanding study The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

52. “Race and the House of Labor,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), 98.

53. Dale Steinhauer, “The Immigrant Soldier in the Regular Army during the Mexican War,” in Papers of the Second Palo Alto Conference, ed. H. Joseph, A. Knopp, and D. Murphy (Brownsville, Tex.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1997), 66. According to Steinhauer, one-quarter were Irish and 1 in 7 was of German birth.

54. Robert Ryal Miller Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 23.

55. On nativist riots during the 1840s and 1850s, see David Grimsted American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 218–45.

56. Miller, Shamrock and Sword, 163.

57. Amy Bridges, “Becoming American: The Working Classes of the United States before the Civil War,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. I. Katznelson and A. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 186. Bridges suggests that the “threatened but as yet unproletarianized crafts … were at the heart of that movement, in organizations like the Order of United American Mechanics, and temperance activity was also strongly associated with nativism.” See also Laurie, Working People, 174–76; and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 323–25.

58. Bruce Laurie, “‘Nothing on Compulsion’: Life Styles of Philadelphia Artisans, 1820–1850,” Labor History 15 (1974): 250. Cited in Bridges, City in the Republic, 96.

59. Michael Hogan The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Guadalajara: Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1997), 136–42.

60. Jenny Franchot Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 100, 109; David H. Bennett The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 40.

61. Matthew Frye Jacobson Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 204.

62. Ibid., 214.

63. Thomas Hietala Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jack-sonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 97.

64. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 102.

65. I understand the process of racialization in Michael Omi's and Howard Winant's terms, as “occurring through a linkage between structure and representation. Racial projects do the ideological ‘work’ of making these links. A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning.” See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 56.

66. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 13.

67. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 86, 87.

68. John Fuller The Movement for the Acquisition of All Mexico, 1846–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 129–30, 162–63; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 175–85; John H. Schroeder Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 35–39; and Anders Stephanson Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 49–55.

69. Fuller, Movement, 85–87, 111–14, 130; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 241; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 48.

70. Fuller, Movement, 51–52, 82–83, 87–89, 109–10, 114–16, 130, 161–62; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 48.

71. Fuller, Movement, 35–36, 53–57, 106–9; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 48–49.

72. Michael Holt The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 248–58; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 237–40; Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War, 6–7, 28–32, 72–78, 129–30.

73. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 237.

74. Democratic Review, August 1847, 101; Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 46–47. In 1845, O'Sullivan declared that it was the manifest destiny of the United States “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (Democratic Review, 17 [1845], 5).

75. For an excellent discussion of the contradictions in O'Sullivan's and other literary Young Americans' use of the concept of Manifest Destiny, see Priscilla Wald Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 105–6. As Wald observes, O'Sullivan's collaborators at the Review, such as Evert Duyckinck, “did not share his politics” (109). She also suggests that while “‘the continent’ of Manifest Destiny rhetoric helped to image and ground coherence” (113), still, “conflicts exacerbated by expansion consistently troubled assertions of national coherence” (115).

76. Ned Buntline, The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey. A Tale of the Mexican War (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 75. Hereafter cited in text. In the 1850s, however, he would promote filibustering expeditions to take over Cuba, in part because of his proslavery allegiances; this imperial enterprise was supported by proslavery Southerners who wanted to expand that institution. See Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 194.

77. Jamie Bronstein Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 146.

78. A.J.H. Duganne The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1855), 231; “Augustine Joseph Hickey Duganne,” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 3, ed. Johnson and Malone (New York: Scribner's, 1937), 492.

79. See Denning, Mechanic Accents, 85–117; David Reynolds Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Reynolds, ed., George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854 (New York: Peter Lang, 1986); Reynolds, “Introduction,” in The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall by George Lippard (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), vii–xliv.

80. Nineteenth Century, vol. 2, 187.

81. See Denning, Mechanic Accents, 112–14.

82. Shelley Streeby, “Haunted Houses: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Middle-Class America,” Criticism 38, no. 3 (1996): 450–58.

83. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 87.

84. Christine Bold Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 2. See also Denning, Mechanic Accents, 20: “In the early years, successful dime novelists like George Lippard, T.S. Arthur, and Ned Buntline were able to begin their own story papers. But the tendency of the industry was to shift from selling an ‘author’ who was a free laborer, to selling a ‘character,’ a trademark whose stories could be written by a host of anonymous hack writers and whose celebrity could be protected in court.”

85. Bold, Wild West, 3.

86. This method has been inspired in particular by the work of Saxton and Denning. In his afterword to the 1998 edition of Mechanic Accents, Denning suggests: “The possibility for oppositional or alternative readings of cultural commodities, whether books or other media, depends finally on the cultivation, organization, and mobilization of audiences by oppositional subcultures and social

87. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 146. See also Canclini, Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico, trans. Lidia Lozano (Austin: University of Texas, 1993), 22: “In short, popular cultures are the product of unequal appropriation of cultural capital, the people's own reflections about their living conditions, and conflictridden interaction with hegemonic sectors.”

88. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 4. On this point, see also Stuart Hall, “What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture?” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 24–33; George Lipsitz Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Denning, Mechanic Accents, 26, 60; Lott, Love and Theft, 17–18.

89. See John Beverley Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 109. Beverley observes that the “left” critique of Cultural Studies “takes the form, generally, of a return to the Frankfurt School.” See also Denning, Mechanic Accents, 260–61.

90. Michael Paul Rogin Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 47.

91. Richard Brodhead Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79.

92. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 171.

93. Ibid., 183.

94. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 29.

95. Ibid., 10–11. See also his first four chapters on the production of and audiences for sensational literature, 1–61.

96. Zboray, “Ironies,” 195–96.

97. Ann Cvetkovich Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 15. For more on European and especially French versions of sensation literature, see Denning, Mechanic Accents, 86–85, 103–5; and Peter Brooks Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985), 143–70.

98. The phrase “sensationalized body genres” is Rogin's; see Blackface, 30.

99. Tom Gunning, “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 51–52.

100. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 125.

101. Ibid., 121–24.

102. The literature on sentimentalism is immense. For some other important discussions of sentimentalism, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977; New York: Anchor-Doubleday 1988); Jane Tompkins Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Phil Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel

Barnes suggests that sentimental literature aims at the “successful conversion of the material body into the immaterial soul” (12); Samuels identifies the “move outside or beyond the boundaries of a gendered or racialized body” (5) as characteristic of sentimentalism; and Sanchez-Eppler notes that sentimental texts often betray a horror of embodiment and respond by reasserting a “Christian and sentimental vision of noncorporeal freedom and personhood” (48).

103. Jonathan Elmer Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 102, 107.

104. Thanks are due to George Lipsitz for his ideas on this point. From a variety of perspectives, a number of scholars have focused on the opposition between liberal constructions of abstract citizenship, on the one hand, and the particularities of persons and the material histories of different kinds of bodies, on the other. See, for instance, Lisa Lowe Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 377–401. Lowe critically engages Marxist theory in order to emphasize how the liberal citizen-subject is “defined by the negation of the material conditions of work and the inequalities of the property system” and is thereby split off “from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment that contradict the abstract form of citizenship” (2). Drawing on the work of Carole Pateman and other feminist critics of liberal contract theory, Berlant has argued that “white male privilege has been veiled by the rhetoric of the bodiless citizen, the generic ‘person’ whose political identity is a priori because it is, in theory,

I do not mean to suggest that there exists a prediscursive, “natural” body that sensational literature somehow liberates through spectacular acts of representation. As Foucault has taught us, there is no prepolitical body that can ground a politics; bodies are constructed through discourse; discourses on the body may operate as disciplinary mechanisms; and the proliferation of discourses on the body was characteristic of a nineteenth-century regime of power that worked in part by investing bodies with meaning. Popular sensational literature may itself be seen as such a disciplinary mechanism insofar as it essentializes bodies even as it helps to construct them. This is perhaps most obvious with respect to race and gender. Sensational literature works as a mechanism of racialization when it represents raced bodies as “something objective and fixed, a biological datum” [Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 55]; it functions as a mechanism of gendering when it constructs women's bodies as essentially and especially vulnerable to extremes of passion and feeling. But this literature may also register the contradictions between the liberal ideal of abstraction and the material and embodied histories and knowledges that this ideal excludes but nonetheless presumes and exploits. These histories and knowledges are not primordial, natural, or preideological; they must be placed within histories of shifts in larger structures such as the organization of labor, the rise of body-transforming institutions such as the prison and the factory, urbanization, and the intensification of U.S. imperial and inter-American contact and conflict.

See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). For readings of Foucault in relation to the British Victorian sensation novel of the 1860s, see Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, esp. 30–32; and D.A. Miller The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

105. Rogin, Blackface, 52.

106. For a quick summary of how during these years “the culture of sentiment became less directly identified with public virtue and benevolence and more associated with women's moral, nurturing role in the private sphere of the bour-geois family,” see Chapman and Hendler, Sentimental Men, 3.

107. Lippard, The Quaker City, 305.

108. Reynolds, “Introduction,” The Quaker City, xxii.

109. Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 600–601.

110. Louisa May Alcott, “Pauline's Passion and Punishment,” in Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers, ed. Madeleine Stern (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 3–4. Hereafter cited in text.

111. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 101.

1. George Lippard, New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853; Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House/Gregg Press, 1970), 284. Here-after citations will appear in the text. This scenario is obviously informed by an agrarian theory of Western lands as a sort of “safety valve” that could mitigate class tensions in the East. For one of the classic American Studies discussions of this theory, see Henry Nash Smith, “The Garden as Safety Valve,” in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 234–45. See also Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New York: Holt, 1994). For persuasive evidence that the safety valve never worked, see Fred A. Shannon, “A Post Mortem on the Labor Safety-Valve Theory,” Agricultural History 19 (January 1945): 31–37. For a helpful discussion of the links between land reform activism and U.S. working-class history, see William F. Deverell, “To Loosen the Safety Valve: Eastern Workers and Western Lands,” Western Historical Quarterly 19 (August 1988): 269–85. For recent work that confronts and complicates the Turnerian premises upon which twentieth-century versions of the safety valve theory are based, see Clyde A. Milner, II, ed., A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For an analysis of Turner's work in relation to his historical context and to other work in American Studies, see David W. Noble The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880–1990 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

2. On the print revolution, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 10–11, 85–117, and throughout; Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16–20, 175–79; and Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 95–108, 321–47.

3. See Johannsen, Halls, 45–67; and Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 208–71. Horsman argues that in “confronting the Mexicans the Americans clearly formulated the idea of themselves as an Anglo-Saxon race. The use of Anglo-Saxon in a racial sense, somewhat rare in the political arguments

4. For popular representations of Mexico as a “false nation,” see Gene Brack Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 1821–1846: An Essay on the Origins of the Mexican War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975). On the nation as imagined community, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York: Verso Press, 1991). According to Anderson, the spread of print capitalism is an indispensable precondition for the rise of modern nationalisms. Because of the conjunction of the print revolution and the war, the late 1840s represent a key moment in the formation of modern U.S. nationalism. On nationalism as “fictive ethnicity,” see Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 96–100. Balibar suggests that “[f]ictive ethnicity is not purely and simply identical with the ideal nation which is the object of patriotism, but it is indispensable to it, for, without it, the nation would appear precisely as an idea or an arbitrary abstraction; patriotism's appeal would be addressed to no one. It is fictive ethnicity which makes it possible for the expression of a preexisting unity to be seen in the state, and continually to measure the state against its ‘historic mission’ in the service of the nation and, as a consequence, to idealize politics” (96).

5. See Priscilla Wald's reading of Freud's 1919 essay “The Uncanny” in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 5–7. Wald notes that Freud's essay was written “while the national boundaries of Europe were being redrawn” (5); links together discussions of nationalism and Freud's meditations on “the anxiety designated by the German unheimlich (literally, not homely or homelike)” (5); and argues that “the uncanny sends us home to the discovery that ‘home’ is not what or where we think it is and that we, by extension, are not who or what we think we are” (7). I find her remarks particularly useful in thinking about the popularization of nationalism and the eruption of uncanny American sensations in the wake of the war with Mexico and the redrawing of national boundaries that followed it.

6. Richard Slotkin The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 192. See also Arthur Pettit Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), 3–79; Norman D. Smith, “Mexican Stereotypes on Fictional Battlefields: or Dime Novels of the Mexican War,” Journal of Popular Culture 13 (spring 1980): 526–40; Johannsen, Halls, 186–202.

7. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 87. David Reynolds considers Lippard to be “the most militantly radical novelist of the preCivil War period.” See Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 205. For other studies of Lippard as an urban writer, see Gary Ashwill, “The Mysteries of Capitalism in George Lippard's City Novels,” ESQ 40, no. 4 (1994): 293–317; Heyward Ehrlich, “The ‘Mysteries’ of Philadelphia: Lippard's Quaker City and ‘Urban’ Gothic,” ESQ 18, no. 1 (1972): 50–65; J.V. Ridgely, “George Lippard's

8. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 195.

9. David Reynolds George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854 (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 9. See also the account of Lippard's trajectory in Denning, Mechanic Accents, 88–89.

10. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 87.

11. For some insightful remarks about the significance of Philadelphia's violently divided public sphere for Lippard's work, see Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 124, 128, 144, 149, 156.

12. Quaker City weekly, 30 December 1848. Hereafter, citations will appear in text.

13. Jamie Bronstein Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 241.

14. Nelson, National Manhood, 151.

15. Bruce Burgett Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15.

16. I have learned much from Nelson's reading of Lippard's The Quaker City in National Manhood. Her suggestions that questions of civic order are mapped across female bodies and that Lippard fears the threat of “unregulated social mixing” (146) are insightful, and they help to explain part of what is at stake in a good deal of the literature that he produced. But the isolation of The Quaker City from the larger body of Lippard's work, especially his journalism, speeches, and post-1845 literature, threatens to makes invisible his activism in labor and land reform movements and other radical democratic associations. This activity complicates Nelson's claims that Lippard's work is symptomatic of “anxieties generated with the middle classes' move toward professionalization” (137). Lippard would have especially resented being aligned with the middle classes. “In every age, the classes improperly styled by this title,” Lippard argued in The Quaker City weekly, “have been the veriest lickspittles of Power” (2 June 1849).

17. In Fatal Environment, Slotkin argues that Mexico became “a darkened mirror in which Americans saw the features of their own culture and society in obscure and exaggerated forms. The divisions of class and race, the political divisions between entrepreneurs and Jacksonian workingmen and paternalists, were reproduced in the depiction of Mexico, making that nation an unwilling

18. On U.S. responses to the European revolutions of 1848, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

19. George Lippard The White Banner (Philadelphia: George Lippard, 1851), 52. Hereafter citations will appear in text. A shorter, slightly different version of Adonai was serialized in the Quaker City weekly, beginning 30 December 1848 and ending 29 September 1849, under the title The Entranced; or, The Wanderer of Eighteen Centuries. The analysis that follows draws on both of these versions.

20. On the repression of the revolution in France, see Roger Price, ed., Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (London: Croom Helm, 1975); and John Merriman The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

21. As Adonai listens to the debate on the floor, one senator argues that the Declaration's premise that “all men are born free and equal” is an “error,” since “[t]here must be classes in this world; there must be castes; there must be rich and poor” (51–52). Another suggests that “Commerce and Manufactures” are “the great ideas of America,” and that the Constitution is meaningless unless they are fostered and protected “even at the expense of ninetenths of the People, and by robbing ninetenths of the fruits of their Labor” (52).

22. “The Imprisoned Jesus” and “The Carpenter's Son,” in Nineteenth Century 1, no. 1 (January 1848): 80, 286.

23. For more on Lippard's representations of the human Jesus, see David Reynolds Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 137–38, 188, 194.

Lippard's interest in uncanny bodies probably derived in part from a Pennsylvania Quaker tradition that had splintered in the first half of the nineteenth century over disagreements about the importance of the earthliness (as opposed to the remote and disembodied divinity) of Jesus and the relationship between the accumulation of capital and spiritual virtue. See Robert Doherty The Hicksite Separation: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Schism in Early Nineteenth Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 31; Bliss Forbush Elias Hicks: Quaker Liberal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); Thomas D. Hamm The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 16; and H. Larry Ingle Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986). In 1827 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends had split into two factions. According to Doherty, Orthodox Pennsylvania leaders tended to be wealthy men who believed that elites should guide the general membership and that “secular success might well be used as a guide to one's spiritual progress” (31). On the other hand, the Hicksite Quakers that the Orthodox opposed were, Thomas Hamm suggests, a more “motley group” composed of “artisans displaced by an industrial economy, farmers with heavy mortgages, extreme conservatives fearful of innovation, and liberals opposed to

24. See also David Reynolds, George Lippard, 89.

25. Bruce Laurie Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 35.

26. He argued that when Calvin's theology was reduced to political economy, “you have this result: The poor, the laboring, the unfortunate, are the castaways, damned in this world, beneath the hoof of oppression and destined to damnation in the next, beneath the frown of God—the Rich, the powerful, the successful, who coin their riches, power, and success, out of the last dregs of human woe, are the ELECT destined to hold the wealth, the power and fame of this world, and to enjoy the eternal happiness of the next” (134).

27. Laurie, Working People, 37, 39.

28. Lippard was raised by evangelical Methodists, and his ideas about the importance of the body were also inspired by a Pennsylvania German communitarian tradition which, he argued, had tried to address “the great problem, which divides the world—Can education and mental progress be conjoined with hard-handed Toil?” (The Quaker City, 19 May 1849). Lippard was especially fascinated by the early immigrant socialists who had founded religious colonies such as Ephrata and Johannes Kelpius's “The Woman of the Wilderness” along the Wissahikon River in Pennsylvania. See David Reynolds, George Lippard, 104–13. See also David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 187–96.

29. Laurie, Working People, 150.

30. George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, ed. David Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 262. On the Kensington and Southwark riots, see Michael Feldberg The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975), ix. See also David Montgomery, “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844,” in Workers in the Industrial Revolution, ed. Peter Stearns and David Walkowitz (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1984), 44–74.

31. See also Denning, Mechanic Accents, 114–15.

32. I am thinking here of Sacvan Bercovitch's analysis of “the myth of America” in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

33. David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 80.

34. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983).

35. George Lippard Legends of Mexico (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1847), 11, 12. Hereafter citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

36. Johannsen, Halls, 16.

37. See Cecil Robinson, The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War, ed. and trans. Cecil Robinson (Tucson: University of Arizona

38. Johannsen, Halls, 8.

39. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35. Hereafter cited in text.

40. For more on the significance of the telegraph in the history of electronic mass media, see George Lipsitz Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 6–7.

41. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 208, 251.

42. Horsman explains that “Anglo-Saxon” was an ambiguous and flexible adjective that “was often used in the 1840s to describe the white people of the United States in contrast to blacks, Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, or Asiatics” (4). But the race scientist Josiah Nott, for instance, classified the Celts with the “dark-skinned” races that he deemed inferior to the Anglo-Saxons. Many nativists would have agreed. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 4, 131. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 206.

43. For an analysis of American millennialism and the idea of Manifest Destiny, see Ernest Tuveson Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 91–136. For an argument about the significance of Puritan millennialism, see Sacvan Bercovitch Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 32–37.

44. On war opposition, see John M. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); and Frederick Merk Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 89–106.

45. The Life and Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3, ed. Daniel Edwin Wheeler (New York: Vincente Parke and Company, 1908), 111. For a discussion of Paine's Crisis papers, see Eric Foner Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 139–142.

46. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 175–80.

47. Jenny Franchot Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 35–82; David Levin History as Romantic Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1959); John P. McWilliams The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 158–86; and Eric Wertheimer Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 128–31.

48. Johannsen, Halls, 30, 146, 150, 156–57, 180, 245–48.

49. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 510.

50. “Cole's Pictures,” Journal of Commerce, Archives of American Art, Reel D6, frame 337. Quoted in Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape

51. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 34. Cole's is a cyclical-providential view of history, as opposed to a redemptive history. For the distinction between the two, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 137–46. For an argument about the persistence of an “apprehension of doom” about the “haunting course of empire” in Jacksonian America based on the cyclical-providential view of history, see Perry Miller, “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature,” in Nature's Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 206–7. I am arguing that a tension between a redemptive and a cyclical-providential view of history haunts Lippard's War literature.

52. On the Black Legend, see Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Against the Black Legend,” in Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56–73; Charles Gibson, ed., The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); David Gutiérrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,” in Milner, A New Significance, 68; Raymund Paredes, “The Origins of Anti-Mexican Sentiment in the United States,” in New Directions in Chicano Scholarship, ed. Ricardo Romo and Raymund Paredes (La Jolla: University of California, San Diego, 1978), 139–65; and David J. Weber The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 335–41. Fernández Retamar argues that although the “crimes” of the Spanish conquerors were indeed “monstrous,” “the nascent bourgeoisie of other metropolises who created the Black Legend” did so “not, of course, for the benefit of those peoples martyred by the Spanish conquest but rather to cover up their own rapacity. … To give a name to this common cause—the cause of world exploitation, genocide, pillage, and horror—they dusted off the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Western culture,’ according to them the very essence of human splendor. This White Legend of the ‘civilized’ West is the reverse of the original, and it has no other purpose or value” (60). For an excellent account of how “these and other constructions of a Spanish other led inexorably to the Enlightenment's exclusion of Spain from the realm of the civilized and even to the U.S. hostile takeover of Spain's empire at the end of the last century” as well as to U.S. ideologies of Manifest Destiny, see George Mariscal, “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory,”Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 7–22.

53. Although Prescott, according to John P. McWilliams, Jr., assumed “the formidable task of acknowledging Spanish cruelties while upholding Spanish heroism” (174), his contemporaries were more likely to emphasize the cruelties even as they paradoxically described the U.S.-Mexican War as a sort of reenactment of the Spanish conquest. “Drawn to the Spanish subject as a critical precursor,” McWilliams writes, “American writers were thus prone to distance themselves from the very analogy their words suggest” (162).

54. For sobering reflections on “the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and spectator” in the context of a discussion of the nineteenth-century emphasis on “the spectacular character of black suffering,” see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in

55. On the incorporation of Europeans as white ethnics through racial exclusion, see esp. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 133–63; and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working-Class History (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 181–98; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, vol. 1 (London and New York: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Michael Paul Rogin Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

56. In response to an earlier version of this essay, George Mariscal pointed out that Arista is constructed as a racialized “oriental” figure in ways that might respond to race scientists' ideas about the Spanish as a mongrel race with African/Arab characteristics. See also Johannsen, Halls, 199.

57. Lippard seemed to regret this later. In the 5 May 1849 issue of the Quaker City weekly, he solicits letters from private soldiers for a book called The Real Heroes of the Mexican War. “It will picture the deeds of every man who distinguished himself, and not confine itself to a mere eulogy of those titled persons, whose greatness too often consists, solely in their rank and official position.”

58. This is a good example of what Dana D. Nelson has identified as the process whereby “national manhood substitutes itself for nascently radical, local democratic practices, energies, and imaginings, not replacing local manhoods so much as enlisting them for and orienting them toward a unified, homogeneous national ideal” (x).

59. On the cult of the “Vanishing American,” especially with regard to Cooper's work, see Lora Romero Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 35–51.

60. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 210.

61. Democratic Review 21 (November 1947): 388–90.

62. For an analysis of these and other stereotypes of women of Mexican origin in California, see Antonia Castañeda, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Stereotypes of Californianas,” in Between Borders: Essays in Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida del Castillo (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto, 1990), 213–36. On the construction of Californiana women in Anglo-American discourses and in testimonios, see Rosaura Sánchez Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995): 198–227.

63. For an important analysis of Chicana critiques of consensual paradigms, see Carl Gutiérrez-Jones Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 103–22.

64. Johannsen, Halls, 91.

65. Bill Brown The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 125, 127, 129. See also Amy Kaplan, “The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision

66. Johannsen, Halls, 221.

67. William H. Prescott History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 362, 365, 366.

68. Ramon Alcaraz et al., The Other Side: or, Notes for the History of the War Between Mexico and the United States, trans. Albert C. Ramsey (1850; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 80.

69. “Third Day” is reproduced in Martha Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben Huseman, Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 29. For more on other popular prints of the encounter at Monterrey, see 14–15, 29–30, 115–31. Thanks to Nicole Tonkovich for calling my attention to this book. See also Ronnie C. Tyler The Mexican War: A Lithographic Record (Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 1973).

70. For two examples, see Sandweiss et al., Eyewitness to War, 115–19.

71. Alcaraz et al., The Other Side, 32.

72. This literature is described by Eric Sundquist, “The Literature of Expansion and Race,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154–55.

73. David J. Weber The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 162–63. See also Neil Foley The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17–19; and Terry G. Jordan German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 31–59.

74. A good deal of promotional literature, usually produced by those with financial investments in colonization projects, was aimed at potential German immigrants. In 1845, for instance, Johann H.S. Schulz called Texas the paradise of North America; another German writer claimed that Texas soil was “among the most fertile in the world” (cited in Jordan, German Seed in Texas Soil, 40). During this period, tens of thousands of German immigrants came to Texas. Some of these colonists were connected to a German overseas colonization society; others settled on empresario grants; and still others were part of a short-lived utopian communal settlement founded by German intellectuals.

75. George Lippard 'Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico (Boston: Hotchkiss and Co., 1848), 20. Hereafter citations will appear in the text.

76. Teresa Goddu Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5.

77. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 14–15.

1. On the significance in the mid-nineteenth-century United States of “a male homosociality that consists of submission to superiors,” see Christopher New-field, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2 and throughout.

2. For the most comprehensive study of late-nineteenth-century U.S. ideologies of manhood and empire, see Gail Bederman Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (winter 1990): 659–89. Most studies of manhood and empire in the first half of the nineteenth century focus on conflicts with U.S. Indians. For two especially interesting examples, see Dana D. Nelson National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 61–101; and Michael Paul Rogin Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), esp. 251–79. In her recent book about the Southern Mines in California during the mid–nineteenth century, Susan Lee Johnson provides an excellent analysis of how ideologies of racialized manhood in California were reconstructed in response to the Gold Rush. See Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000). See also Johnson's “‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender,” in A New Significance: ReEnvisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–78; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's groundbreaking essay “Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 90–108. See also Cynthia Enloe's chapter “Nationalism and Masculinity,” in Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 42–64.

3. On women's involvement in the war, see Elizabeth Salas Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 29–33; Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136–38; and Linda Vance, “Women and the Mexican War,” Papers of the Second Palo Alto Conference, ed. H. Joseph, A. Knopp, and D. Murphy (Brownsville, Tex.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1997), 51–56.

4. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 433–34. Cited in Salas, Soldaderas, 30.

5. John Greenleaf Whittier, The Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 116. See also Johannsen, Halls, 216–17. For a critique of the Mexican nationalist image of the soldadera as the carrier of “a fatal load of abnegation, silent suffering, stoicism, and stubborn veneration for their men,” see Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards, ed. and trans. John Kraniauskas (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 6. On debates among Chicanas and

6. On the prevalence in imperial discourse of “sexual and gendered metaphors” that feminize the colonies, see Ann Laura Stoler Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 174. See also Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 260–84; and Caren Caplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Women and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). On nineteenth-century representations of Mexico and Cuba as white women, see Michael Hunt Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 59–61.

7. See also Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 585: “In debates about the annexation of Texas and later Mexico, both sides represented the new territories as women to be married to the U.S.”

8. On the “rhetorical relationship between heterosexual passion and hegemonic states” in the nineteenth-century Latin American context, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 31 and throughout. I call such conceptions of heterosexuality “emergent” because medical and legal narratives of homosexual and heterosexual identity do not begin to proliferate until at least the last third of the nineteenth century. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2 and throughout. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Jonathan Katz, “The Invention of Heterosexuality,” Socialist Review 20 (1990): 17–34; and “‘Homosexuality’ and ‘Heterosexuality’: Questioning the Terms” and “Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men's Erotic and Affectional Relations with Men in the United States, 1820–1892,” in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 177–80, 216–35; John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedmen, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 121; George Chauncey, Jr. “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance,” Salmagundi, nos. 58–59 (fall 1982–winter 1983): 114–46; Siobhan Somerville Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and Charles Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 1973): 131–53. On sexuality in mid-nineteenth-century New York,

9. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 1. See also David Potter The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).

10. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 175.

11. For a suggestive analysis of race and norms of manhood and sexuality during the Civil War, see Christopher Looby, “‘As Thoroughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire’: Erotics of Race in Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 71–115.

12. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 176.

13. On O'Sullivan and Young America, see Perry Miller , The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956); Priscilla Wald Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 106–26; and Edward Widmer Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

14. Henry Nash Smith Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 95–96. See also Ralph Admari, “Ballou, the Father of the Dime Novel,” American Book Collector 4, no. 34 (September–October 1933): 121–29; Peter Benson, “Maturin Murray Ballou” and “Gleason's Publishing Hall,” in Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Madeleine Hall (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1980), 27–35, 137–45; and Mary Noel Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 18–55.

15. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990). On the Whigs, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Daniel Howe The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). On the Democrats, see Jean Baker Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid–Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). On nativist organizations, see Ray Allen Billington The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964); Dale Knobel “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 1–154; and Louis Scisco Political Nativism in New York State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1901). See also Essays on Antebellum American Politics, 1840–1860, ed. Stephen Maizlish and John Kushma (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982).

16. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 75. I am adapting Sommer's category “international romance” as she elaborates it in Foundational Fictions.

17. See the Flag of Our Union, 25 March 1848; see also Noel, Villains Galore, 33.

18. Flag of Our Union, 24 July 1847. Hereafter, citations appear in text.

19. Flag of the Free, 26 April 1849. But it also attacked the “radicalism of the present day” as a “spirit of Fourierism” that “strikes boldly at the rights of individual property” (16 January, 1847).

20. Admari, “Ballou,” 122.

21. On literacy rates, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 30–31.

22. Benson, “Gleason's Publishing Hall,” 140.

23. For a suggestive analysis of the complex relationship between capitalism and ideas about adventure, see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, vol. 1, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

24. Wald, Constituting Americans, 109, 114.

25. Admari, “Ballou,” 122.

26. See Admari, “Ballou”; and Benson, “Maturin Murray Ballou.”

27. For more on Averill, see Smith, Virgin Land, 94, 96–98, 106, 111, 126.

28. Quoted in Benson, “Gleason's Publishing Hall,” 141.

29. Johannsen, Halls, 186–87.

30. Richard Brodhead Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79. It is also true, as I suggested in the introduction, that there were many male sentimentalists. See Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

31. I agree with Denning that the “assumption of a universal middle-class culture” has too often “paralyzed serious thinking about class and culture” (259). The relationship between a working-class audience and the often middle-class values promoted by mass-produced literature, which was also read by members of other classes, is a question that must be investigated in particular contexts rather than a formula that can be assumed to make the former disappear within the latter.

32. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 79.

33. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 583, 584. For more on domesticity in a global context, see the collection Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary George (Boulder: Westview, 1998), especially George's excellent introductory essay, “Recycling: Long Routes to and from Domestic Fixes,” 1–20.

34. Daniel Cohen, “Introduction,” in The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America's Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 20. Examples include the cross-dressed military maids featured in ballads, pamphlets, broadsides, and other literature about the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War; the dimenovel Amazons of the second half of the nineteenth century that Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land read as a disturbing sign of an increase of sensationalism in U.S. culture; and the cross-dressed picaras

35. Davidson, Revolution, 185; Young, Disarming, 156.

36. The “Rio Grande” marked the contested boundary between Mexico and the United States that had sparked the war of 1846–1848, and “Aroostook” indicated a conflict, which nearly became a war, between the United States and England over the U.S.-Canadian border a few years earlier.

37. See also the Flag of the Free, 10 June 1848.

38. Kirby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 144–47. See also Theodore Allen The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 1,Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and New York: Verso, 1994); Oscar Handlin Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

39. William J. Orr and Robert Ryal Miller, “Introduction,” in Frederick Zeh, An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, ed. Orr and Miller, trans. Orr (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), xviii. See also Sister Blanche Marie McEniry American Catholics in the War with Mexico (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1937). On Irish soldiers who fought for Mexico, see Michael Hogan The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Guadalajara: Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1997); Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma

40. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 10–11.

41. Ibid., 15–16.

42. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 6, 14.

43. For a useful summary of these transformations, see Charles Sellers The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

44. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 132.

45. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2, 93, 96, 154.

1. See “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Oscar J. Martinez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 26.

2. Neil Foley The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13, 15.

3. I take the phrase “irresistible romance” from Doris Sommer Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

4. Thomas Bangs Thorpe The Taylor Anecdote Book: Anecdotes and Letters of Zachary Taylor (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1848), 42.

5. Dale Knobel Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 60–62, 90–95.

6. Cited in Sister Blanche Marie McEniry American Catholics in the War with Mexico (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1937), 126.

7. [Luther Giddings]. Sketches of the Campaign in Northern Mexico by an Officer of the First Regiment of Ohio Volunteers (New York: George P. Putnam and Co., 1853), viii.

8. See Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 162: “Nativism had subsided with the outbreak of the Mexican War, but it rose up again in the mid-1850s with the sudden appearance of the Know-Nothing Movement.” Studies of nativism in the mid–nineteenth century include Ray Allen Billington The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (1938; Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Dale Knobel “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

9. Charles Averill The Mexican Ranchero: or, The Maid of the Chapparal. A Romance of the Mexican War (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 91–92. Hereafter cited in text.

10. David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 141.

11. Ibid., 133–63. For more on the Irish and whiteness, see Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White;Theodore Allen The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and New York: Verso, 1994); Michael Paul Rogin Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 56–58; Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71, 75, 94–96, 148–49, 237; Matthew Frye Jacobson Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4, 5, 13, 15–19, 38, 41, 46, 48–56, 68, 70, 159; Foley, The White Scourge, 97–98.

12. T.B. Thorpe, Our Army on the Rio Grande (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), 132. See also Thorpe, Our Army at Monterey (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), 96; John Kenly Memoirs of a Maryland Volunteer (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1873), 299; Richard McSherry El Puchero: or, A Mixed Dish from Mexico (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1850), 90.

13. See Jacobson, Whiteness, 38.

14. Dale Steinhauer, “The Immigrant Soldier in the Regular Army during the Mexican War,” in Papers of the Second Palo Alto Conference, ed. H. Joseph, A. Knopp, and D. Murphy (Brownsville, Tex.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1997); and Robert Ryal Miller, “Introduction,” in Frederick Zeh, An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, ed. Orr and Miller, trans. Orr (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). On the U.S. Army during the war, see James McCaffrey Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and Richard Winders Mr. Polk's Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997). On war mobilization and the idealization of the volunteer, see Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21–67.

15. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 100, 109; David H. Bennett The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 40.

16. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st session, Appendix, 100.

17. Zeh, Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, 4.

18. Ibid., 4, 5.

19. When Zeh criticizes his fellow soldiers for vandalizing a Catholic church, for instance, he adds: “[In] this land which is as lovely as it is wretched, there is not the slightest trace [of Christian civilization], notwithstanding all the anxious devotion to ritual” (48).

20. Ibid., 79.

21. Ibid., 55.

22. Michael Hogan The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Guadalajara: Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1997), 41, 112. Other studies of the San Patricios include Robert Ryal Miller's Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the

23. For fascinating examples of how war can intensify social antagonisms in ways that encourage imaginative and actual alliances with the national so-called enemy, see George Lipsitz The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 184–210; and George Mariscal, “Aztlán in Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 36–46, 84–96, 126–32, 168–69, 242–43.

24. Hogan,Irish Soldiers, 92.

25. Ibid., 160.

26. George Davis Autobiography of the Late Col. Geo. T.M. Davis (New York: Published by his legal representatives, 1891), 227–28.

27. Raphael Semmes Service Afloat and Ashore During the Mexican War (Cincinnati: W.H. Moore, 1851), 428.

28. Many soldiers' personal narratives and histories include anecdotes about the San Patricios, often noting their spectacular punishment and execution. See, for instance, Samuel Chamberlain My Confession (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 228: “The execution of the last number was attended with unusual and unwarrantable acts of cruelty. … Colonel Harney, on account of the proficiency he had acquired as an executioner in hanging Seminoles in Florida, was selected to carry out the sentence.”

29. Daniel Ullmann, “The Course of Empire: An Oration Delivered Before the Order of United Americans” (New York: William B. Weiss, 1856), 5. Here-after cited in text. For more on Ullmann, see Jacobson, Whiteness, 70–72.

30. See also Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 585.

31. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, 109.

32. Ibid., Appendix, 301; and 30th Congress, 1st Session, 120. Most of the Whigs, on the other hand, adopted a “No Territory” position in order to stop “an immoral war of aggression by making its prolongation pointless,” as well as to sidestep the sectional controversies provoked by the Wilmot Proviso, which stipulated that slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude should be out-lawed in any territory acquired from Mexico. See Michael Holt The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 253.

33. Robert J.C. Young Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9.

34. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, 301. According to historian Reginald Horsman, “[T]he Whig press constantly reiterated its fears of racial amalgamation.” See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 238–39.

35. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, 516. R.M.T. Hunter went even further: “I do not want their people. … But I have many reasons for desiring to acquire a portion of their territory contiguous to us which is so nearly unoccupied that the influence of these people could not be sensibly felt, as a political element in our system.” See ibid., 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 276.

36. Ibid., 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 273.

37. Ibid., 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 132.

38. Ibid., 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 218.

39. Ibid., 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 278.

40. The following novels were read for this chapter: The Prisoner of Perote: A Tale of American Valor and Mexican Love (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848); Arthur Armstrong's The Mariner of the Mines: or, The Maid of the Monastery (Boston: F. Gleason, n.d.); Charles Averill's The Secret Service Ship, or, The Fall of San Juan D'Ulloa (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848) and The Mexican Ranchero: or, The Maid of the Chapparal (1847); Buntline's Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid (New York: Williams Brothers, 1847) and The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847); Alice Cleveland's Lucy Morley: or, The Young Officer (Boston: F. Gleason, 1846); Newton Curtis's The Hunted Chief: or, The Female Ranchero (New York: Williams Brothers, 1847), The Vidette, a Tale of the Mexican War (New York: Williams Brothers, 1848), and The Prairie Guide: or, The Rose of the Rio Grande (New York: Williams Brothers, 1847); Robert Greeley's Arthur Woodleigh, A Romance of the Battle Field in Mexico (New York: William B. Smith, 1847); Harry Halyard's four novelettes, The Mexican Spy: or, The Bride of Buena Vista (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848), The Ocean Monarch: or, The Ranger of the Gulf (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848), The Heroine of Tampico: or, Wildfire the Wanderer (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), and The Chieftain of Churubusco, or, The Spectre of the Cathedral (Boston: F. Gleason, 1848); J.H. Ingraham's The Texan Ranger: or, The Maid of Matamoras (New York: Williams Brothers, 1847); and Harry Hazel's [Justin Jones], Inez, the Beautiful: or, Love on the Rio Grande (Boston: Justin Jones, 1846). Citations from each will be cited parenthetically in the text.

41. Antonia Castañeda, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Stereotypes of Californianas,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida del Castillo (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1990), 220, 225. See also Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Richard Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 230–59; Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 46, 57–62; Rosaura Sánchez Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 188–267; David Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 37, 49.

42. Castañeda, “Political Economy,” 220, 223.

43. On the disruptive effects of female masculinities, see Judith Halberstam Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

44. See also Elizabeth Young Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 167–70. Young argues that in Loreta Velazquez's The Woman in Battle, a Civil War–era text about cross-dressing, “military masquerade” provides “a symbolic frame for the representation of male homoeroticism”; she also observes that “the homosocial world of the military afforded new opportunities for the expression and representation of homoerotic desire” (169).

45. For a brief discussion of how the “demasculinization of colonized men and the hypermasculinity of European males represent principle assertions of white supremacy,” see Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 215.

46. Young, Colonial Desire, 109.

47. See also José Limón American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 136–37.

48. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 249.

49. Ibid., 337, 201.

50. Ibid., 184.

51. Ibid., 113.

52. Ibid., 184–85.

53. Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 154.

54. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 119.

55. Ibid., 338.

56. On marriage contracts in the United States during this period, see Amy Dru Stanley From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 175–217. See also Norma Basch In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

57. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 87.

58. Ibid., 29th Congress, 2nd Session, Appendix, 232.

59. Carole Pateman The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 83.

60. Carl Gutiérrez-Jones Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 44.

61. See Lott, Love and Theft; Rogin , Blackface, 19–44; and Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy, Vernacular Comics, and the Politics of Slavery in the North,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin Blatt (New York: Garland, 1998), 157–75.

62. Lott, Love and Theft, 194.

63. Michael Holt The Political Crisis of the 1850's (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), 42–43.

64. Michael Paul Rogin Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Her-man Melville (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1983), 106.

65. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 262.

66. Ibid., 349.

67. Ibid., 87.

68. See Lucy Maddox Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–49.

69. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 197.

1. Peter Buckley, “The Case against Ned Buntline: The ‘Words, Signs, and Gestures’ of Popular Authorship,” Prospects 13 (1988): 256; and Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (New York: Bonanza: 1951), 48, 55. The information about Buntline's literary career in the 1840s is drawn from these two sources.

2. On popular romances of the 1890s and the recasting of the Spanish-Cuban-American War as a “rescue mission for American manhood,” see Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (winter 1990): 659–90.

3. Ned Buntline, The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 9. Hereafter cited in text.

4. On the Romantic privileging of the country over the city as a response to industrialization, see Raymond Williams Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

5. On Whittier's antiwar poetry, see Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford, 1985), 215–17.

6. Ned Buntline, Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid: A Story of Buena Vista (New York: Williams Brothers, 1846), 33. Hereafter cited in text.

7. On the stereotype of men of Mexican origin as “idle squanderers,” see Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 51–53.

8. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 150.

9. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 85.

10. Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life (New York: Berford and Co., 1848), part 1, 11. Hereafter cited in text.

11. Buntline, Mysteries and Miseries, part 5, 14–15.

12. Albion, 19 February 1848; cited in Peter Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984, 389.

13. Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 298–99.

14. Buckley, “The Case against Ned Buntline,” 251.

15. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 175.

16. Scrapbook Volume G, Charles Patrick Daly Papers, New York Public Library.

17. Ibid.

18. Ned Buntline, The B'hoys of New York: A Sequel to the Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, n.d.), 72. Hereafter cited in text.

19. Tom Chaffin Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 49–50.

20. Charles Brown Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 45–47.

21. Robert E. May, “Young American Males and Filibustering in the Age of Manifest Destiny: The United States Army as a Cultural Mirror,” Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 863.

22. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 194. Former employee Thomas Paterson, who wrote a scathing and vindictive biography of Buntline, argued that “[h]is own account is, that being in Havana, he made the acquaintance of Don Manuel de Candelario, who had a daughter called Dona Seberina, living in the palace of her aunt, the Countess Escudera, and that he no sooner appeared in his sailor's toggery, and combed redrusty hair, than Duchess and Countess prostrated themselves before him.” He was rumored to have abandoned her when she became ill and was also said to be having an affair with a married woman in Nashville while Dona Seberina was still alive. Since in the course of his lifetime he was charged with bigamy and was married several times, it would not be surprising if this were true. See Thomas Paterson The Private Life, Public Career, and Real Character of that Odious Rascal NED BUNTLINE!! (New York: Thomas Paterson, 1849), 7.

23. Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 93–98.

24. Ibid., 99.

25. Ibid., 110.

26. Ibid., 109–10.

27. Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans (New York: Akarman and Ormsby, 1851), 24. Hereafter citations appear in text.

28. Luis Martínez-Fernández Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 26–27. See also Gerald Poyo “With All and For the Good of All”: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7.

29. Ned Buntline, The Convict: or, The Conspirator's Victim (1851; New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1863), 22. Hereafter citations appear in text.

30. Sean Wilentz Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 344. See also Bruce Laurie Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 174–77.

31. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 165.

32. Ned Buntline's Own, 8 February 1851.

33. Ibid., 27 August 1853.

1. A.J.H. Duganne The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant. A Tale of Modern Mexico (New York: Beadle, 1861), 20.

2. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 186.

3. Ibid., 200.

4. Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy, Vernacular Comics, and the Politics of Slavery in the North,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin Blatt (New York: Garland, 1998), 166.

5. John H. Schroeder Mr. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 35–38.

6. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 322.

7. On the Wilmot Proviso, see Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” Journal of American History 56 (1969): 262–79; and Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60, 83, 106, 116, 164, 188, 190, 267, 309, 314. Wilmot's proposed amendment stated that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any territory on the continent of America which shall hereafter be acquired by or annexed to the United States.” See Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 318.

8. Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 21, 136, and throughout.

9. See Sean Wilentz Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). According to Wilentz, by “the mid-1840s, land reform had captured the imagination of almost every labor radical still active in New York” (336).

10. Helene Zahler Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 67. On the land reform movements in Britain and the United States during this period, see Jamie Bronstein's excellent study, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). For more on Evans, see David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 71, 77–80, 110; John Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City: A Social History of Abolition and Land Reform in Jacksonian New York,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 1977; Saxton, Rise and Fall, 96, 102, 103, 206–7; Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129, 132, 155, 202.

11. Working Man's Advocate [hereafter WMA], 16 March 1844.

12. Ibid., 10 May 1845.

13. Bronstein, Land Reform, 128. For a comprehensive discussion of these cultural forms, see chapter 5, “Making Working Class-Activism: Anglo-American Organizational Strategies,” 112–59.

14. Ibid., 146.

15. See the Voice of Industry, 14 April 1848. On Bagley as editor of the Voice, see Madeleine Stern, ed., We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Schulte Publishing Company, 1963), 85–86.

16. A.J.H. Duganne The Poetical Works of Augustine Duganne (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1855), 226, 229.

17. Louis Scisco Political Nativism in New York State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1901), 240.

18. Duganne, Poetical Works, 97.

19. Ibid., 233.

20. Ibid., 229.

21. Matthew Frye Jacobson Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 210.

22. Walter Benn Michaels, “Anti-Imperial Americanism,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 365–91; and Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

23. Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (December 1847); and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9 (1843–1847). Edited by Ralph Orth and Alfred Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 430–31. For a more detailed consideration of Emerson's positions on such questions, see John Q. Anderson, “Emerson on Texas and the Mexican War,” Western Humanities Review 13, no. 2 (spring 1959): 191–99.

24. See Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 277–78.

25. Sermons on War by Theodore Parker (reprinted from volume 4 of the 1863 edition of The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances P. Cobbe), with a new introduction by Alice Kessler Harris (New York: Garland, 1973), 23. On Parker's opposition to the war, see also Johannsen, Halls, 278.

26. Ibid., 37.

27. Ibid., 26, 54, 62, 73.

28. Ibid., 24.

29. Anders Stephanson Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 56.

30. Robert Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers (London: J.C. Hotten, 1865), 44–45.

31. Ibid., 30, 28.

32. Cited in Johannsen, Halls, 218.

33. North Star, 21 January 1848. All of the Douglass quotations that follow are from this source.

34. Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (December 1847).

35. Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: A Collection of Sketches and Letters. 2d ser. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 100–101. Hereafter citations will appear in text.

36. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 102.

37. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 334–35. For more on Walsh, see Robert Ernst, “The One and Only Mike Walsh,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 26 (1952), 43–65; Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77–79; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 75, 77, 80; and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 327–35, 340, 342, 356–57, 359, and 389.

38. Subterranean, 6 June 1847.

39. Ibid., 16 May 1846.

40. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 340. See also Bronstein, Land Reform, 164.

41. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 103.

42. Voice of Industry, 12 June 1846.

43. Ibid., 11 December 1846.

44. Ibid., 9 January 1847.

45. Cited in Young America, 6 September 1845. Hereafter YA.

46. Cited in Voice of Industry, 25 June 1847.

47. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 65–66.

48. Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 278.

49. Voice of Industry, 26 November 1847.

50. See also Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 80.

51. WMA, 22 March 1845.

52. YA, 27 December 1845.

53. Ibid., 26 July 1845.

54. Ibid., cited in the Voice of Industry, 27 November 1846.

55. YA, 2 April 1845.

56. WMA, 11 May 1844.

57. Ibid., 15 June 1844.

58. He argued, for instance, that just as the United States owed the Indians land “in return for that of which they had been robbed,” so did “blacks have the same right, in lieu of that from which they have been stolen away.” See WMA, 15 November 1845.

59. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 79.

60. YA, 26 April 1845.

61. WMA, 22 March 1845.

62. Amy Dru Stanley From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x.

63. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 74. For a discussion of the history of the use of the terms “white slavery” and “wage slavery” in the antebellum labor movement, see Roediger's entire chapter “White Slaves, Wage Slaves, and Free White Labor,” 65–92. For a discussion of Evans's role in these discussions, see 77–80.

64. See also ibid., 78–80.

65. Radical, November 1841, 165.

66. YA, 27 December 1845.

67. Ibid., 6 December 1845.

68. Ibid., December 27, 1845.

69. Ibid., January 10, 1846.

70. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1714. Hereafter cited in text.

71. See, for instance, Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 210.

72. Gilbert Joseph, “The United States, Feuding Elites, and Rural Revolt in Yucatán, 1836–1915,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 176.

73. Robert W. Patch, “Decolonization, the Agrarian Problem, and the Origins of the Caste War, 1812–1857,” in Land, Labor, and Capital in Modern Yu-catán: Essays in Regional History and Political Economy, ed. Jeffrey T. Brannon and Gilbert M. Joseph (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 52.

74. The account that follows is drawn from Joseph's article as well as from Nelson Reed The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964).

75. 30th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Executive Document 45. In Brantz Mayer, Mexican Miscellanies, vol. 11, no. 14, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

76. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 604.

77. Ibid., 616, 618.

78. Ibid., 612.

79. Ibid., 712.

80. Ibid., 618–19.

81. Ibid., 633.

82. Ibid., 712.

83. National Reform Almanac for 1849 (New York: Young America, 1849), 41. Hereafter cited in text.

84. Bronstein, Land Reform, 33.

1. For more on the Republican appropriation of National Reform issues, see Helene Zahler Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 175–201.

2. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxvi.

3. See Eugene H. Berwanger The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 123, 129–31, 134–37.

4. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 317.

5. Foner, Free Soil, xxvii. See also Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 5–6, 12–15, 33–37, 51, 69–70, 153–54; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 47, 81,

6. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 317.

7. See Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

8. Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d Session, Appendix, 315. For a discussion of the myriad “halfway houses of semifree labor” in the antebellum period, see Foner,Free Soil, xxvii–xxviii. Foner notes that the “West, imagined (and often experienced) by white laborers as a land of economic independence, simultaneously harbored indentured Indian labor, Mexican-American peonage, and work under long-term contracts for Chinese immigrants” (xxvii). See also Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293–326; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

9. Raphael Semmes Service Afloat and Ashore During the Mexican War (Cincinnati: W.H. Moore, 1851), 17. Hereafter cited in text.

10. Arnold J. Bauer, “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 1 (January 1979): 34–63. See also Alan Knight, “Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?” Journal of Latin American Studies 18 (May 1986): 41–72; Eric Van Young Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 236–69; Charles Gibson The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 220–56; Magnus Morner, “The Spanish American Hacienda: A Survey of Recent Research and Debate,” Hispanic American Historical Review 53, no. 2 (May 1973): 183–216; D.A. Brading Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio, León 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 3–4, 9–10, 25–26, 35–38, 76–77, 97–100, 196–99); Francois Chevalier, “The North Mexican Hacienda: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The New World Looks at Its History, ed. Archibald Lewis and Thomas McGann (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 95–107; Harry Cross, “Living Standards in Rural Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Zacatecas, 1820–1880,” Journal of Latin American Studies 10 (1978): 1–19; John Tutino, “Life and Labor on North Mexican Haciendas: The Querétaro-San Luis Potosí Region, 1775–1810,” in El Trabajo y los Trabajadores en la Hístoria de México, ed. Elsa Frost, Michael Meyer, and Josefina Vázquez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), 339–78.

11. Knight, “Mexican Peonage,” 42, 45–46.

12. John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (1936; Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988), 52–57. Steinbeck deplores the treatment of foreign labor but still claims that white laborers have too much

13. See also The Rough and Ready Annual, or Military Souvenir (New York: Appleton, 1848), 194; and Richard McSherry El Puchero; or, A Mixed Dish from Mexico (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1850), 144.

14. Bill Brown Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 14.

15. Advertisement in Mary Denison Tim Bumble's Charge (New York: Beadle, 1862); Catalogue of Beadle's Dime Novels in N.C. Iron The Two Guards (New York: Beadle, 1863).

16. Philip Durham, “Introduction,” in Seth Jones and Deadwood Dick on Deck, ed. Durham (New York: Odyssey, 1966), ix. This estimate is based on Durham's study of 1,531 Beadle's titles.

For more on dime novel genres see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (1987; London: Verso, 1998). Denning rightly points out that “Beadle and Adams, though important, did not entirely dominate sensational fiction” (15). Although in this study I consider other forms of popular literature such as the story paper, my analysis of the dime novel after 1860 is largely based on Beadle's fiction. But even though in this book I do not analyze post-1860 dime novels published by firms other than Beadle's, my research suggests that other publishers similarly issued an extensive array of novels about the border, Mexico, and the Americas.

17. Brown, Reading the West, 167.

18. Ibid., v.

19. Richard Slotkin Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 405–40. Hereafter cited in text.

20. Slotkin argues that the “‘Mexico’ of counterinsurgency films is a potentially ‘Americanizable’ land” (410).

21. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 186

22. A.J.H. Duganne The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant. A Tale of Modern Mexico (New York: Beadle, 1861), 22, 85. Hereafter cited in text.

23. Francis Hodge Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 4.

24. A.J.H. Duganne Putnam Pomfret's Ward; or, A Vermonter's Adventures in Mexico (New York: Beadle, 1861), 54, 55, 57.

25. Jan Bazant, “From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821–1867,” in Mexico since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–38.

26. Brian Hamnett Juárez (London: Longman, 1994), 154, 157. The information in this paragraph is based on Hamnett and Bazant. See also Richard Sinkin The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1979); and Laurens Perry Juárez and Diaz: Machine Politics in Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978).

27. Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 613–20, 630–33.

28. Bazant, “From Independence to the Liberal Republic,” 12.

29. Ana Maria Alonso Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 120–26. See also Charles A. Hale Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 222–46; Rosaura Sánchez Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 96–141.

30. John M. Hart, “The 1840s Southwestern Mexico Peasants' War: Conflict in a Transitional Society,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 249–68; Leticia Reina, “The Sierra Gorda Peasant Rebellion, 1847–1850,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, 269–94; John Kicza, “Introduction,” in The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience, and Acculturation (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1993), xxi–xxii; Jack Spicer Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), 334–42; John Tutino From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 242–64; Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 35–38. But see also Dawn Fogle Deaton, “The Decade of Revolt: Peasant Rebellion in Jalisco, Mexico, 1855–1864” and Michael Ducey, “Liberal Theory and Peasant Practice: Land and Power in Northern Veracruz, Mexico, 1826–1900,” in Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America, ed. Robert Jackson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 37–93. Ducey argues that “a wide gap often separated the objectives of the liberal legislation and the manner in which local officials and villagers enforced the laws,” and that it was “only in the late nineteenth century that the liberal property regime became a system for the widespread expropriation of peasant producers” (65).

31. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 338.

32. Hale, Mexican Liberalism, 221, 237–39.

33. Sánchez, Telling Identities, 127.

34. Hale,Mexican Liberalism, 200; Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos, 2.

35. Foner, Free Soil, ix.

36. Ibid., xix. See also Roediger,The Wages of Whiteness, 43–92.

37. See also Barry Goldberg, “Slavery, Race, and the Languages of Class: ‘Wage Slaves’ and White ‘Niggers,’” New Politics 1, no. 3 (summer 1991): 65–83.

38. Foner, Free Soil, xxi–xxii.

39. Roediger,The Wages of Whiteness, 87.

40. Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, 224.

41. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos, 2–3.

42. Ibid., 5, 9.

43. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 35, 66. Roediger argues that republicanism “suggested that long acceptance of slavery betokened weakness, degradation, and an unfitness for freedom. The Black population symbolized that degradation” (66).

44. Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 68.

45. See Walter Hugins Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class: A Study of the New York Workingmen's Movement, 1829–1837 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 27, 33, 108, 138, 145, 146.

46. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos, 2.

47. A.J.H. Duganne Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf (New York: J.P. Robens, 1865), 15. Hereafter cited in text.

48. David Montgomery Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1967), 75; Ronald Formisano The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 286, 340.

49. Eric Foner Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 55.

50. Ibid., 55. W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), 68. Hereafter cited in text.

51. Foner, Reconstruction, 56, 60. See also Rebecca Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation,” American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (February 1994): 70–102.

52. Foner, Reconstruction, 235.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 237.

55. Ibid., 236–39.

1. A.J.H. Duganne Putnam Pomfret's Ward; or, A Vermonter's Adventures in Mexico (New York: Beadle, 1861), 45. Hereafter cited in text.

2. Bill Brown Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 32, 31.

3. Ibid., 31.

4. Charles Harvey, “The Dime Novel in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly 100 (July 1907): 39, 43.

5. See the many titles on these topics from the first Beadle's series in Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, vol. 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 92–99. There are even more examples from later years.

6. José David Saldívar Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–14, 159–83.

7. David Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 33.

8. U.S. Congress, House, Difficulties on the Southwestern Frontier, H. Exec. Doc. 52, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 2 April 1860, 80–81. Cited in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Oscar J. Martinez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 75–76. See also Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 32.

9. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 26–32.

10. John Emerald Cortina, the Scourge; or, The Lost Diamond (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1872), 9. Hereafter cited in text.

11. Brown, Reading the West, 5.

12. Carol Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (November 1990): 15.

13. Gary Anderson and Alan Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 12; Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials,” 17.

14. Quoted in Roy W. Meyer, History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 114.

15. The account in this paragraph is largely drawn from Chomsky's article and the Through Dakota Eyes collection.

16. Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials,” 13. See also David Nichols Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 65–118.

17. Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials,” 15.

18. Daryl Jones The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1978), 8.

19. Christine Bold, “Malaeska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction,” in Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 23. See also Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860 to 1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–36.

20. Edward Ellis, “Seth Jones; or the Captives of the Frontier,” in Brown, Reading the West, 188–89, 198. Hereafter cited in text.

21. Jones,Dime Novel Western, 149.

22. Edward Ellis Indian Jim: A Tale of the Minnesota Massacre (New York: Beadle, 1864), 10. Hereafter cited in text.

23. Edward Ellis The Hunter's Escape: A Tale of the North West in 1862 (New York: Beadle, 1864), 38.

24. Ellis, Hunter's Escape, 13.

25. Michael Paul Rogin Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 151. See also Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975).

26. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 162.

27. Bold, “Malaeska's Revenge,” 23.

28. Stephens was also an editor for several other magazines during the course of her career, including the Portland Magazine, Graham's Magazine, The Ladies' World, Peterson's Ladies National Magazine, and Mrs. Stephens Illustrated New Monthly, and she had also written several very successful novels, perhaps most

29. “Malaeska,” in Brown, Reading the West, 57.

30. Ann Stephens Myra: The Child of Adoption. A Romance of Real Life (New York: Beadle, 1860), 11; Stern, We the Women, 49.

31. Ann Stephens Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail (New York: Beadle, 1862), 121. Hereafter cited in text.

32. Ann Stephens Sybil Chase; or, The Valley Ranche. A Tale of California Life (New York: Beadle, 1861), 43. Hereafter cited in text.

33. Bold, “Malaeska's Revenge,” 24.

34. Albert Johannsen The House of Beadle and Adams, vol. 2 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 29–30. For more on the sisters and their dime novels, see Henry Nash Smith Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 264–68.

35. Frances Fuller Barritt Victor Alicia Newcome, or, The Land Claim: A Tale of the Upper Missouri (New York: Beadle, 1862), 5. Hereafter cited in text.

36. Metta Victor The Backwoods' Bride. A Romance of Squatter Life (New York: Beadle, 1860), 14. Hereafter cited in text.

37. Metta Victor The Two Hunters; or The Cañon Camp. A Romance of the Santa Fé Trail (New York: Beadle, 1865), 15. Hereafter cited in text.

38. See Neil Foley The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 19–24; and Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. 46.

39. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 149.

40. Morris W. Foster Being Comanche: A Social History of the American Indian Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 46.

41. Foster, Being Comanche, 47.

42. See Curtis Marez, “Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popular Performance,” American Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2001): 267–307. According to Foster, the new borderline between the United States and Mexico actually “worked to the advantage of Comanche bands” because “Mexican authorities could not pursue Comanche raiders into Texan and U.S. territory” (45). The phrase “transfrontera contact zone” is José David Saldívar's. See Saldívar, Border Matters, 13.

43. Metta Victor The Unionist's Daughter: A Tale of the Rebellion in Tennessee (New York: Beadle, 1862), 18. Hereafter cited in text.

44. Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 149.

45. May, Southern Dream, 247.

46. For more on Walker, see Charles Brown Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 174–218, 266–457; May, Southern Dream, 77–135; Richard Slotkin The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 242–61; William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates (New York: Macmillan, 1918).

47. William Walker The War in Nicaragua (Mobile, Ala.: S.H. Goetzel and Co., 1860), 263.

48. Ibid., 263–64, 265.

49. Ibid., 265, 266.

50. Ibid., 280.

51. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 261–62.

52. For biographical information on Denison, see Johannsen, House of Beadle and Adams, vol. 2, 79. For quick readings of a few of Denison's 1850s novels, see Baym, Woman's Fiction, 270–72.

53. Johannsen, House of Beadle and Adams, vol. 2, 79.

54. The Prisoner of La Vintresse was the second novel that she wrote for Beadle; she also authored Beadle's Dime Novel no. 6, Chip: The Cave-Child (1860), which was about the daughter of a Delaware Indian woman and a Frenchman in Pennsylvania; Florida; or, The Iron Will (1861), a drama of bigcity life among the elite; Ruth Margerie: A Romance of the Revolt of 1689 (1862), a story of the Puritans; Tim Bumble's Charge (1862), which features a “comical” Irishman; The Mad Hunter (1863), a New York murder mystery; and a novel about the American Revolution, Captain Molly (1856).

55. James Buchanan et al., “The Ostend Conference,” in What Happened in Cuba? A Documentary History, ed. Robert Smith (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), 65.

56. Buchanan et al., “The Ostend Conference,” 67.

57. Philip Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 101.

58. May, Southern Dream, 75, 76.

59. “Republican National Platform, 1856,” in What Happened in Cuba?, 75.

60. For more on filibustering's place in American social history, both North and South, see Robert E. May, “Young American Males and Filibustering in the Age of Manifest Destiny: The United States Army as a Cultural Mirror,” Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 857–86.

61. On the first, see Saxton, Rise and Fall, 141–54. On the material interests, see Luis Martínez-Fernández Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 24.

62. On López, see May , Southern Dream, 26–27.

63. Ibid., 52.

64. Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires, 167–68.

65. Mary Denison The Prisoner of La Vintresse; or, The Fortunes of a Cuban Heiress (New York: Beadle, 1860), 16, 40. Hereafter cited in text.

66. Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 281–83.

67. Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires, 227.

68. Ibid., 228.

69. Saldívar, Border Matters, 5.

70. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 815.

71. Joseph Roach Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See also Kirsten Silva Gruesz's “New Orleans: Capital of the Nineteenth Century” in her book Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

72. José Límon, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 7–33.

73. Foley, White Scourge, 15, 17.

1. Joseph Badger, Jr.,Joaquin the Terrible: The True History of the Three Bitter Blows that Changed an Honest Man to a Merciless Demon, Beadle's New York Dime Library 13, no. 165 (21 December 1881): 6. Hereafter cited in text.

2. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 160.

3. Ibid., 166.

4. Lisbeth Haas Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2, 69.

5. David Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 73.

6. Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 72.

7. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 303.

8. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 165.

9. See chapter 4.

10. See John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955); and the California Police Gazette version of the story, which was published under the title The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California (1932; Fresno, Calif.: Valley Publishers, 1969). The latter includes a bibliography listing some of the different versions of the Murrieta story (117–20). For some of the corrido versions, see Luis Leal, “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta: Origen y difusión,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11, no. 1 (winter 1995): 18–23; and liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la

Many of the Spanish-language versions, including a novel published in Los Angeles in 1919, seem to be based on the California Police Gazette adaptation. See Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California, x. Subsequent citations from the two novels appear in parentheses in the text. Citations from the Police Gazette version are preceded by PG, and those from the Ridge version are preceded by R. All quotations from the Murrieta corrido, whether in Spanish or in English translation, are from the Arhoolie Records liner notes, and will also appear parenthetically in the text.

11. Susan Lee Johnson Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 28, 48, 50. This study appeared just as I was finishing my revision of the manuscript.

12. Malcolm Rohrbough Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 216–29. See also Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 26–29; Jay Monaghan Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Alexander Saxton, “Mines and Railroads,” in The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 46–66; and Johnson, Roaring Camp, 57–95.

13. On the reconstruction of whiteness in this period, see Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991); and Saxton, Rise and Fall.

14. On “structures of feeling,” see Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–34.

15. See JoAnn Pavletich and Margot Gayle Backus, “With His Pistol in Her Hand: Rearticulating the Corrido Narrative in Helena María Viramontes' ‘Neighbors,’” Cultural Critique 27 (spring 1994): 127–52; Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram, “Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses,” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3: 208; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don't Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chicanos (Girl, Us)/Chican as—into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–95. For an analysis of female soldiers in corridos, see María Herrera-Sobek The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 84–116.

16. See Carl Gutiérrez-Jones Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

17. Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 20. Balibar further defines the immigrant complex as “a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions” (21).

18. On the epic heroic corrido, see José Limón Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 16–77; John McDowell, “The Corrido of Greater Mexico as Discourse, Music, and Event,” in “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, ed. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 44–75; Américo Paredes “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); and José David Saldívar, “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón and Saldí-var (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 170–73.

19. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother … (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 206.

20. See Frank Luther Mott A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 186–87, 325–37; Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, eds., American Mass-Market Magazines (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990), 284–91; and Gene Smith and Jayne Barry Smith, eds., The Police Gazette (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).

21. Nourie and Nourie, American Mass-Market Magazines, 285. See also Saxton, Rise and Fall, 207–9.

22. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 326.

23. See H.H. Bretnor The California Police Gazette, a brief description (typescript in Bancroft Library, #88305, 1955); and Joaquin Murieta, the Brig-and Chief of California, v.

24. California Police Gazette, 24 September, 8 October, and 15 October 1859.

25. Ibid., 24 September 1859.

26. Alonzo Delano, Life on the Plains and among the Diggings, 157, quoted in Winifred Storrs Hill Tarnished Gold: Prejudice during the California Gold Rush (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1995), 10.

27. See Pedro Castillo and Albert Camarillo, eds., Furia y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos (Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, UCLA, 1972); Daniel Cohen Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

28. James Varley The Legend of Joaquín Murrieta: California's Gold Rush Bandit (Twin Falls, Idaho: Big Lost River, 1995), 48–65.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 75–76. See also Johnson, Roaring Camp, 38.

31. Varley, The Legend of Joaquín Murrieta, 138.

32. Johnson also notes that Ridge's novel “owed a debt to the genre of cheap fiction” about banditry. See Roaring Camp, 48.

33. James Parins John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 107.

34. Ibid.

35. See Cheryl Walker Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 111. According to Walker, although Ridge was of Cherokee descent, he was “a metropolitan, acculturated Indian who migrated from Indian territory to California and upheld views repugnant to those who wished to maintain traditional Indian cultural practices” (111). Nonetheless, Walker suggests that Ridge “speaks as much as an Indian as he does as a voice of white culture” (112). See also John Carlos Rowe Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 97–119.

36. On Cherokee Removal, see William Anderson, ed., Cherokee Removal: Before and After (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Lucy Maddox Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15–28; and Priscilla Wald Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 23–47. See also Walker, Indian Nation, 112–19.

37. Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 55.

38. Ibid., 103.

39. Karl Kroeber, “American Indian Persistence and Resurgence,” boundary 2 19, no. 3 (fall 1992): 6.

40. Peter Christensen, “Minority Interaction in John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,” MELUS 17, no. 2 (summer 1991–1992): 63.

41. On James Fenimore Cooper's distinctions between “good” and “bad” Indians, see Saxton, Rise and Fall, 191.

42. Christensen, “Minority Interaction,” 62.

43. Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 126.

44. Ibid., 129.

45. Rosaura Sánchez Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 275–79.

46. Hill, Tarnished Gold, 40. See also Donald C. Biggs Conquer and Colonize (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio, 1977), 202–6.

47. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 9 and throughout.

48. Leonard Pitt The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53. See also Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 55; and Ramón Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America's Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17, no. 1 (spring 1986): 89.

49. Sister Mary Colette Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California, 1848–1856: A Study in Prejudice,” in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 3–21.

50. Douglas Monroy Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 206. For the figure on Sonoran migration, see David Gutiérrez Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 19.

51. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 52. See also Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

52. Cited in Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush, 114. See also Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 55–56.

53. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 56; and Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California,” 7.

54. Josiah Royce California From the Conquest of 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1886), 361.

55. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 53; Royce, California, 277; Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California,” 10; and Johnson, Roaring Camp, 38.

56. David Gutiérrez, “Introduction,” in Between Two Worlds, 10.

57. Royce, California, 364.

58. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56, 79.

59. Omi and Winant define racial formation “as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55).

60. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 57.

61. Ibid., 65–68.

62. In Roaring Camp, Johnson suggests that “the rangers seemed soldiers engaged in a rearguard action designed to shore up the gains of the late expansionist war” (37).

63. I borrow the term “national fantasy” from Lauren Berlant The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

64. For more on Gonzales's “I am Joaquín—Yo Soy Joaquín” and the Murrieta bandit narrative, see Johnson, Roaring Camp, 50.

65. On the limitations of Chicano responses to displacement and loss that codify “machismo as a concept around which to ground cultural affiliation,” see Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands, 123–62.

66. See Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Viking, 1992), 140. Thanks are due to Barbara Brinson-Curiel for telling me about this essay. See also Rosaura Sánchez, “Calculated Musings: Richard Rodriguez's Metaphysics of Difference,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 153–73.

67. See Ramón Saldívar Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 32, 36; and McDowell, “The Corrido of Greater Mexico as Discourse, Music, and Event,” 45–46.

68. Limón, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems, 34.

69. Leal, “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta,” 1–23.

70. Liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, 37.

71. Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 66.

72. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 40.

73. Ibid., 45.

74. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930's (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 53.

75. Ibid., 55.

76. George Sánchez Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 211.

77. Camille Guerin-Gonzales Mexican Workers, American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 78.

78. Walter Noble Burns, The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta, Famous Outlaw of California's Age of Gold [1932] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Hereafter citations will appear in text.

79. See Thomas Doherty Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 319–72. This book includes three appendixes that contain the text of the Production Code as well as related documents.

80. Cited in ibid., 351, 352–53, 356, 362, 364.

81. Helen Delpar The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 169, 170.

82. Alfred Charles Richard, Jr., Censorship and Hollywood's Hispanic Image: An Interpretive Filmography, 1936–1955 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 22.

83. C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 121.

84. New York Times, 14 March 1936.

85. Chris Strachwitz, “The Singers,” in Mexican-American Border Music. Vols. 6 and 7:Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, Arhoolie Records, 1994, 16, 18. See also Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 183.

86. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 184. According to Sánchez, District Attorney Burton Fitts, who “believed that only English should be heard on the radio and that only American citizens should have the right to broadcast” (184), was responsible for the arrest.

87. See ibid., 178, 183–85; and Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands, 2–3, 50–56. I agree with the latter that González's example shows how “the stereotypical ascription of ‘criminality’ to Chicanos must be read in the context of larger U.S. institutional aims, including the maintenance of Chicanos and Mexicanos as a malleable, productive underclass” (3).

88. Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 135.

89. María Herrera-Sobek Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xxiii.

90. Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 9. According to Paredes's logic, a “nationalist sentiment” would first be strongly articulated in Texas because of the battles there in the 1830s. In general, nationalist feeling was weak in the borderlands areas after Mexican independence in 1821, especially in California, which was so far removed from greater Mexico. See also Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 30. According to Gutiérrez, “[In] the quarter century before annexation, many, if not most, Spanish-speaking residents of Mexico's northern provinces did not even identify themselves as Mexicans and instead probably thought of themselves first as Nuevomexicanos, Tejanos, or Californios” (30).

91. My understanding of hybridity has been influenced by Lisa Lowe's discussion of this concept in the Asian American context in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Lowe suggests: “Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process by which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives” (82).

92. See Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 137–38, for information about décimas, corridos, and the Mexican broadside press.

93. See Sánchez, Becoming Mexican-American, 21–22.

94. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–112.

95. Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound, 34–63, esp. 41–43.

96. Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40.

97. Cited in Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 260.

98. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 33. See also 35 for a compelling analysis of how ideas about manhood figure in the Murrieta story.

99. For an excellent discussion of violence in working-class forms of popular culture in the 1930s, see C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 118–48.

100. Julie Skurski, “The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Bárbara and the Construction of National Identity,” in Becoming National, ed. Eky and Suny, 371–40.

101. In Spanish, the lines are as follows: “No soy chileno ni extraño/en este suelo que piso./De México es California,/porque Díos así lo quizo.”

102. Citing Fichte, Balibar suggests that for nationalism to take hold of subjectivities, “the ‘external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or—what amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and will always be—‘at home.’” See Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Hence the unheimlich qualities of the corridos, which haunt the U.S. home and make its borders unfamiliar.

103. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 95.

104. Liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, 37.

105. All Bush quotations are from the georgewbush.com website.

106. All Gore quotations are from the gorelieberman.com website.

107. All Buchanan quotations are from the buchananreform.com website.

108. ColorLines, 30 April 2001, 6.

109. Los Angeles Sentinel, 29 November 2000. See also the Chicago Defender, 11 November 2000, 1.

110. Miami Times, 23 January 2001, 1A.