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This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848 - including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this 'literature of sensation' that reveal the profound influence that the US-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on US politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding US history and literature.This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A J H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and, much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in US history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the US-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.