Listening to Nineteenth-Century America - by Mark M Smith (Paperback)

About the Book

Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Smith explores how what 19th-century Americans heard in their daily lives helped shape their understanding of such events and institutions as the coming of the Civil War, slavery, freedom, and modernization. How, why, and what people heard contributed significantly to the construction of what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free.

Book Synopsis

Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free--to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War--we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard.

Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.

Review Quotes

Mark Smith has turned up the volume on the political rhetoric, resistance tactics and soundscapes of sectional disputes, slavery, the Civil War and much more. Students of history, filmmakers and anyone interested in the sound of America will find this book indispensable. (Douglas Kahn, University of Technology, Sydney)

This groundbreaking book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the roots of secession. (Eugene D. Genovese, author of "A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South")