Todd Nathan Thompson, professor of English, published a chapter titled "Form: an Empire of Jokes in the American Age of Expansion" in the book A Cultural History of Comedy in Age of Empire.
This book, edited by Matthew Kaiser, is Volume 5 of Bloomsbury's six-edition Cultural History of Comedy series. Thompson's chapter considers how popular media containing nineteenth-century American humorcomic almanacs, joke books, humor periodicals, newspapers, and comic lecturesexpressed an imperial fantasy of Manifest Destiny through jokes and sketches featuring comic frontiersmen pushing ever west and comically encountering the "other."