A revealing juxtaposition of the literatures of Manifest Destiny and a dream deferred

"American Sensations is an erudite and sweeping cultural history of the sensationalist literatures and mass cultures of the American 1848. It is the finest book yet written on the U.S.-Mexican War, and how it was central to the making and unmaking of U.S. mass culture, class, and racial formation."—José David Saldívar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies "A major work that will challenge current paradigms of nineteenth-century literature and culture. American Sensations brilliantly succeeds in remapping the volatile and shifting terrain of both national identity and literary history in the mid-nineteenth century."—Amy Kaplan, co-editor of Cultures of United States Imperialism

Includes selections from Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Stewart Edward White, O. Henry, and Mary Austin.