Paper Money Men Commerce Manhood and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America by David Anthony outlines the emergence of a sensational public sphere in antebellum America. It argues that this new representational space reflected and helped shape the intricate relationship between commerce and masculine sensibility in a period of dramatic economic upheaval. Looking at a variety of sensational mediafrom penny press newspapers and pulpy dime novels to the work of wellknown writers such as Irving Hawthorne and Melvillethis book counters the common critical notion that the periods sensationalism addressed a primarily workingclass audience. Instead Paper Money Men shows how a wide variety of sensational media was in fact aimed principally at an emergent class of young professional men. Paper money men were caught in the transition from an older and more stable mercantilist economy to a panicprone economic system centered on credit and speculation. And Anthony argues they found themselves reflected in the sensational public sphere a fantasy space in which new models of professional manhood were repeatedly staged and negotiated. Compensatory in nature these alternative models of manhood rejected fiscal security and property as markers of a stable selfhood looking instead toward intangible factors such as emotion and race in an effort to forge a secure sense of manhood in an age of intense uncertainty.