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Book Review
American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. By Shelley Streeby. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvi, 384 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-22314-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-520-22945-2.)
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The lack of attention paid to the U.S.-Mexican war by United States historians is somewhat baffling, given the plethora of works on the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Indeed, one could argue that the primary historiographical importance accorded the war with Mexico has been the role it played in increasing sectionalism and provoking the Civil War. Certainly America's "forgotten war" (p. 6) was an important catalyst in that later conflict, but it also had a serious and lasting social and cultural impact of its own. In her impressively argued study of mid-nineteenth-century empire building, Shelley Streeby gives the Mexican war its due by using understudied works of literature to map out the way the war and other antebellum imperial ventures throughout the Americas shaped U.S. politics and culture. |
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