| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shelley Streeby. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. (American Crossroads, number 9.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 384. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.

As a graduate student, I read Cecil Robinson's With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature (1963) and the simplicity of the work profoundly influenced my understanding of the importance of literature in understanding racism. The present generation of literary scholars is bolder than Robinson; going beyond stereotypes, they are wonderfully imaginative. But, I wonder if the complexity of the message and style of their books has the same impact as With the Ears of Strangers had for me. 1

Take Shelley Streeby's book, which analyzes dime novels, popular from about 1840 to 1890, in relation to the U.S.-Mexican War and mid-nineteenth-century empire building. Her purpose is to comprehend such fiction's impact on "race, nativism, labor, politics, and popular and mass culture in the United States" (p. xi). George Lippard (1822–1854) is featured in the first chapter and pops up throughout the book. A Philadelphia editor, journalist, and writer of cheap sensational literature, Lippard, according to Streeby, was the dime novel's foremost proponent of class struggle. Lippard's Gothic narratives, filled with scenes of massacres, rapes, and naked women, damn the rich and champion the poor. A product of Protestant Philadelphia, Lippard reflected the class biases and aspirations of the artisan class of that city. Likewise, Lippard's novels on the Mexican-American War are filled with blood, guts, and sex. While sympathetic toward the poor Mexican, according to Streeby, the Philadelphian supported the Mexican American War because of his paranoia about Catholic conspiracies and saw empire building as a solution to the evils of industrial capitalism. While Streeby's argument is plausible, my materialist leanings lead me to a simpler explanation: the sensationalized novel was for profit, and sex and violence always sell books. . . .

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