Radical Sensations

"Radical Sensations is superb scholarship in every way. It engages many emerging currents in contemporary scholarship but has the field of transnational radicalism between 1886 and 1927 all to itself. Among its many contributions, a singularly important one is Shelley Streeby's explanation of why culture counts and how history happens. Part of politics is the production and management of affect. Streeby shows how sentiment and sensation became the lingua franca of American politics in the nineteenth century, with mixed results for radical social movements. The very discourses of sentiment and sensationalism that enabled some radical critiques to gain traction with the masses hobbled others by letting sympathy substitute for social justice." - George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"This is a brilliantly conceived book, filled with novel insights into the ways that new media and visual technologies intersected with and enabled what Shelley Streeby aptly terms 'the proliferation of rival world visions and internationalisms’ of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Radical Sensations is the book that I have been waiting to teach in courses on U.S. history or transnational methodology." - Penny M. Von Eschen, author of Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957

“Provocative and insightful. . . .” - Paul Buhle, Journal of American History

“Radical Sensations is a work of astonishing complexity, a cultural history that gives us a portrait into a bridge period of Hemispheric eras, one that must piece together nineteenth-century physical expansion to later twentieth-century articulations….” - Samantha Pinto, American Literature

"[Streeby's] unique approach and nuanced use of visual and print sources make this book a must-read for all labor historians."  - David M. Struthers, Labor