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Peter Buckley's unpublished 1984 doctoral dissertation, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), is still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.