Book excerpt: "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