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.