When I fi rst thought about studying US cultural history, the antebellum period seemed a rather unlikely place to set up shop. In the broader sweep of American culture, these were the decades known as early or mid-"Victorian," a period typically defi ned by its rigid social strictures and cast as dour precursor to the more dynamic cultural experiments of fi n de siècle "modernism." Adding to my doubts was a sense that much of the previous scholarship on antebellum culture seemed oddly out of sync with the era's great social, economic, and political upheavals. The decades before the Civil War were among the most volatile in the nation's history. Yet many key sources of that volatility -from northern emancipation to the anti-slavery crusade, the rise of the metropolis to the rapid expansion of market capitalism -appeared to fall within the methodological bailiwick of other historical subfi elds and modes of questioning.
Twenty years later, antebellum cultural history looks like another place entirely. The long-running caricatures of Victorian priggery have given way to a more nuanced understanding of middle-class cultural formation. The older emphasis on white social elites has been challenged by path-breaking studies of workers, women, immigrants, and African Americans. The antebellum period itself has been reconceptualized as a wellspring of the modern rather than its opposite or antipode. And the range of cultural forms generating scholarly attention has expanded to include a far more diverse mix of vernacular, commercial, and transnational sources.
Similarly dramatic has been the collective impact of all this methodological stretching. From the rise of "class cultures" and "racial formations" during the 1980s, to current debates about the "market revolution" and "empire," antebellum cultural historians have frequently set new research agendas for the discipline as a whole. And this is to say nothing of the many fruitful cross-pollinations across disciplines. Since the inauguration of the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin book prize in 1987, roughly half of the winners have addressed antebellum topics, often venturing into historical terrain (such as the commerce of slavery) previously understood as well outside the boundaries of "cultural" analysis. During the same period, new cohorts of scholars conversant in transatlantic cultural studies have returned to many of the foundational forms of antebellum commercial entertainment (such as