mark m. (mark michael) smith - making sense of social history - journal of social history 37:1

Copyright © 2003 by Peter N. Stearns. All rights reserved.

Journal of Social History 37.1 (2003) 165-186

Making Sense of Social HistoryMark M. SmithUniversity of South Carolina

[M]an is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, butwith all his senses.… The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entirehistory of the world down to the present.

Karl Marx1

I

Eric Hobsbawm was in ebullient mood in 1970. "It is a good moment to be a socialhistorian," he concluded his influential essay, "From Social History to the History ofSociety." For reasons he'd understand but because of developments in the writing of thehistory of the senses that he probably didn't anticipate, Hobsbawm might well sound asimilar note of optimism were he to write the essay today. 2

I'd like to suggest why Hobsbawm's understanding of social history seems to have beenimportant to relatively recent work on the history of the senses—most of which is on thehistory of aurality—even if that influence is not always acknowledged explicitly by some ofthe authors concerned. Part of the difficulty in determining the influence of social history,especially as opposed to cultural history, is that for many historians generally, includingseveral of those whose work is examined here, there has been a merging of the terms of"cultural" and "social" history so that the two have become virtually synonymous. Whilethere are some methodological differences in the writing of cultural and social history, I seethe two as, in fact, having fused, not least because what is commonly identified as culturalhistory is pretty much within the definition of social history offered by Hobsbawm. I do notmean to suggest that all recent work on the history of the senses has been shapedexclusively by social history methodology and concerns, nor do I wish to suggest that theseworks are of one piece. Plainly, some of the techniques of cultural history—especially theemphasis on linguistic analysis—have been important to writing on the history of thesenses. Moreover, some intellectual historians and scholars of the history of medicine haveoffered penetrating observations on the history of the senses, observations that should provehelpful to future work on sensory history. 3 What I do argue is that the history of the senses

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—possibly one of the most significant advances in the writing of history in recentyears—owes something to the contributions of social history, particularly as Hobsbawmdefined it.

For Hobsbawm, social history's principal promise and strength resided in its expresseddesire to examine and reveal the interplay among economics, politics, and culture, a desirereflected in a methodology and a style of historical investigation characterized by a resoluteeclecticism, a refusal to be hedged by artificial boundaries, and a drive to contextualizewhat those working on, say, [End Page 165] purely economic, intellectual, or politicalhistory tended to isolate. With that main strength in mind, Hobsbawm ventured that themost interesting and relevant work by social historians would flourish in the fields of urbanhistory, the historical examination of classes, social groups, mentalities and cultures, and inwork on the rise of modernity, industrialization, and nationalism. 4

A good deal of work on the history of the senses—much of it very recent—has beeninformed by the main epistemologies, ontologies, and habits of thinking about the pastinspired by social history. 5 Social history's impetus toward a braided analysis, one in partinfluenced by the Annales school, has a way of alerting historians to the role that sensesbeside vision—the preponderant way historians still tend to "view" the past—have playedin human affairs. Certainly, as George H. Roeder, Jr. has shown, U.S. history textbooks,thanks principally to the influence of social history, are "more likely than those writtenbefore 1970 to address seriously the historical role of sensory experience." It is neverthelessthe case that the vast majority of historians still work from the assumption that the past isbest seen rather than, say, heard or smelled. Indeed, even the examples of the inclusion ofthe senses in textbooks and some monographs offered by Roeder tend to remain incidentalto the main narrative, their presence and function to flesh and excite the writing rather thanexplore explicitly the roles of all the senses in any systematic way. 6

The social historians' tendency to consider the breadth, depth, and interlaced aspects of thehuman experience has helped create a frame of mind and nurse an investigative temper andway of understanding that has prompted some of them to go beyond an unwittingly visualistrepresentation of the past. Thanks in part to this habit, some social historians no longersimply assess past experience through the eyes of historical actors but now also considerhearing, smell, touch, and taste in informing matters concerning urban, religious, political,and economic history and specific questions concerning technology, national identity, andmodernity. 7

Of course, it could be argued that recent work that treats explicitly seeing, visuality, andocularity is itself refreshing because it unpackages and explains the way that visualitybecome so dominant in the West by detailing the rise of print culture, the advent ofscientific and technological instruments that empowered the eye, and Enlightenment questsfor visualist perspective and balance. Judging by Martin Jay's pioneering work—Jay is anintellectual historian who is careful to distance himself from the exaggerated claims for theprimacy of the eye made by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong and who understands thatthe hegemony of vision didn't mean that there was just one way of seeing—the effect ofscholarship on seeing tends, nevertheless, to cast sight as the predominant sense in the


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modern world. While such work has been helpful in explicitly identifying seeing as onesense among many, it has also tended to stress the hegemony of the eye and, by implication(though hardly by design) has privileged sight to the exclusion of other, related, ways ofunderstanding the past. 8

In light of this visualist emphasis, historians of the (other) senses have had to make theircase by showing, for example, the importance of the sense of hearing and its embeddednessin all sorts of historical social relations, economic arrangements, and political contests. Ineffect, then, they have had to become social historians, even if it is to show the importanceof their topic to all walks of life, which is precisely what Hobsbawm meant when he spokeof the interrelatedness [End Page 166] of social history's epistemology. Naturally, advancesin the writing of cultural history have affected how historians of the senses conceptualize,narrate, and explicate their projects. But, for reasons that Hobsbawm made clear in 1970, Ithink the methodological, intellectual, and conceptual touchstones influencing many of therecent books on the histories of the senses are as indebted to the conceptual apparatus ofsocial history as to the innovations of cultural history and linguistic analysis. 9

A brief disclaimer of sorts is in order. My own interest in the history of the senses derivesprincipally from my reading of now classic social history, especially work by Hobsbawmand E. P. Thompson. Although my recent work on listening and aurality in nineteenth-century America has been tagged a style of "cultural" history—a label to which I have novisceral reaction or objection—it was, in fact, E. P. Thompson's social history ofwork-discipline and time and Hobsbawm's call for an integrated historical approach thatalerted me to the fact that the past was not simply mediated through the eyes of historicalactors but also through their ears. Thompson's groundbreaking work on time consciousness,how time was communicated through sound as well as sight, led me to inquire further intohow individuals experienced, understood, made sense of, and invented their environmentsand themselves in ways beyond mere seeing. 10 My aim in this essay is not to shoehornothers who have worked on the senses into my own intellectual trajectory, but, rather, toassess to what extent the basic components of social history seem to have shaped theirtopics and analytic and narrative strategies. As with my own work, which attempted tolisten to the meaning of economic, political, and military sounds (and silences) in an effortto convey the flavor of a broadly construed "society" and thereby add depth to ourunderstanding of antebellum sectional identities among a variety of classes andconstituents, some of the work under consideration here is equally ambitious inasmuch as itoften attends to questions of group mentalities, modernity, national identity, and therelationship between technology and society using not just detailed analyses of texts andlanguage but, more often, the kind of concrete empirical data that Hobsbawm thoughtcharacteristic of social history.

My larger point is to suggest that thanks in part to the investigative style of social history,histories of the senses promise to rescue us from an Enlightenment conceit with visualitythat is not only pernicious in its silent effect on historical writing but also responsible for asometimes misleading, partial, and distorted "view" of the past.

II


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Hobsbawm's optimism in 1970 about the future of social history was rooted in a judiciousand penetrating survey of the field. Then, as now, defining social history was problematic.The phrase and, by extension, the field, meant several things. On one level, social historyreferred "to works in a variety of human activities difficult to classify except in such termsas 'manners, customs, everyday life'." Another meaning—one with which Hobsbawm hadsome sympathy—was the bracketing of social with economic history, not an unhealthyrelationship in his estimation because "it threw light on the structure and changes in society,and more especially on the relationships between classes and social groups." Social [EndPage 167] history also "referred to the history of the poor or lower classes," so-calledhistory from the bottom up, a definition that has proven remarkably tenacious even though,from Hobsbawm's perspective, it was deceptive because an exclusive emphasis on thebottom entailed a deliberate and unhelpful isolation of classes and the social production ofpower relations contingent on the interplay of those classes. In Hobsbawm's view, socialhistory's examination of "class must therefore involve the rest of society of which it is apart. Slave-owners cannot be understood without slaves, and without the non-slave sectorsof society." 11

Hobsbawm was most impressed with the idea that "[s]ocial history can never be anotherspecialization like economic or other hyphenated histories because its subject-matter cannotbe isolated." "The intellectual historian may (at his risk) pay no attention to economics, theeconomic historian to Shakespeare," argued Hobsbawm, "but the social historian whoneglects either will not get far." Here, Hobsbawm expressed his admiration to "the greatFrenchmen" who "preferred to describe themselves simply as historians and their aim as'total' or 'global' history, or as men who sought to integrate the contributions of all relevantsocial sciences in history, rather than exemplify any one of them." While "Marc Bloch,Fernand Braudel, Georges Lefebvre are not names which can be pigeonholed as socialhistorians," that, it seems, is precisely what Hobsbawm thought social history should be:expansive, elastic, eclectic, reluctant to privilege one field of inquiry over another, willingto examine mentalities as well as concrete economic processes and structures. 12

Several scholars have endorsed Hobsbawm's view. A decade after Hobsbawm wrote hisessay, Peter N. Stearns also suggested that one of the strengths of social history was to"deepen understanding" of a variety of topics and he argued convincingly that it was"impossible to define social history adequately by discussing it in terms of period or area."Stearns also contended that social history was not simply "a catch-all category for thosesubjects that other kinds of history left out;" rather the field was driven not just by the desireto recover the history of daily life but also by an effort to connect "findings with moreconventional historical topics," a striving to offer a more complete "portrait of a period,beyond the findings of strictly political or intellectual history." "Social history," maintainedStearns, "is separated from intellectual history not only by its explicit concern for thepopular resonance of ideas but also by its focus on popular belief systems, by its attention tothe variety of sources and artifacts that evidence those belief systems, and by its interest inthe interaction of mental attitudes and behavior." The concern for outlook or mentalattitude, he ventured, "relates social historians not only to cultural but also to psychologicalhistory, in intent if not usually in conceptual arsenal," and such borrowing from other fieldsnecessarily led social history to deal with questions of "emotional as well as cultural


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causation." 13 So, by 1980, the kind of trajectory anticipated by Hobsbawm in 1970 was,according to Stearns at least, in the process of being realized. 14

Not everyone agrees, of course. Yet even those who make a compelling case fordistinguishing between social and cultural history come surprisingly near to echoingHobsbawm. By the standards of Hobsbawm's definition of social history, the delineation ofcultural history offered by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob seems, well,remarkably like social history, the difference [End Page 168] being one of emphasis anddegree, less of absolute kind. 15 Although they are probably right to suggest that socialhistorians sometimes depart company from cultural ones when it came to treating the mind"as the site where identity is formed and reality linguistically negotiated," their contentionthat the "historian of culture sought to dig beneath the formal productions of law, literature,science, and art to the codes, clues, hints, signs, gestures, and artifacts through whichpeople communicate their values and truths" and "began to see that culture particularizesmeaning because cultural symbols are endlessly reshaped in everyday encounters," wouldhardly elicit vehement disagreement from social historians such as E. P. Thompson. Andwhile it is true that cultural history tends to favor anthropological and literary treatments ofmeaning, it is perhaps too much to argue that cultural historians aim to interrogate meaningwhile social historians focus on questions of causality. 16

After all, social historians also look for meaning and casual explanations. The two areinextricable to social historians not least because they examine the interplay—neitherreductionist nor determinative—of society and mentality. Thus, when Appleby, Hunt, andJacob argued that cultural history "implied that people's beliefs and ritual activitiesinteracted with their economic and social expectations and did not simply mirror theirsocioeconomic situations," most social historians could only nod in agreement since thoseinfluenced by Hobsbawm never posited a hard argument concerning simple mirroring in thefirst place. On the whole, social historians are careful to avoid decontextualizing the life ofthe mind and culture from the larger structures of which they were a part. While Appleby,Hunt, and Jacob note that E. P. Thompson—someone Hobsbawm considered, rightly, apractitioner of social history—"explicitly devoted himself to the study of what he called'cultural and moral mediations' and 'the ways these material experiences are handled...incultural ways'," they also recognize that Thompson was unwilling to go as far as LouisAlthusser. Thompson, they point out, "drew back from the more extreme postmodernistpositions associated with the cultural turn," worrying that "postmodernism, especially withits emphasis on discourse, stood aloof from real history by wrenching language from socialreality." It was Thompson's training as a social historian—his conviction in interplay, notdecontextualization—that led him to recoil from extreme postmodernism, a worry thatAppleby, Hunt, and Jacob see as legitimate. 17

In short, his own penchant for the significance of economic matters notwithstanding,Hobsbawm seemed to suggest that the very strength and vitality of social history resided inits quest for thematic inclusiveness, in its ability to engage and learn from other disciplines,in its interdisciplinarity. Such inquisitiveness and versatility, he ventured, would onlyaugment the historical understanding of "the phenomena which are traditionally the subjects


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of interest to the social historians—for example, collective consciousness, socialmovements and the social dimension of intellectual and cultural changes." 18

III

If we grant the importance of the Annales school to social history and its emphasis onprocesses that strive to take account of how the many parts—economic, intellectual,political, cultural—combine and interact to produce (and reflect) [End Page 169] the social,we can see the influence at work in some recent books on the history of the senses. LeighEric Schmidt, for example, in his compelling history of religion, the AmericanEnlightenment, and aurality, makes the intellectual debt to the Annales school quite explicit.Schmidt explains the relevance of, for example, Lucien Febvre's section on "Smells, Tastes,and Sounds" in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century and notes RobertMandrou's contribution "in detailing a history of hearing loss in his inventory of the sensesin early modern France." Even though Schmidt isn't particularly impressed by some of theevidence marshaled in support of Mandrou's claim about the apparent denigration ofaurality in the modern era, he recognizes that such suggestive arguments were important forhelping historians question the assumptions concerning the putative victory of the visualistaesthetic during and after the Enlightenment. For this reason, Schmidt is cognizant thatwriting on the topic of the history of the senses remains indebted to the efforts of these earlysocial historians. 19

Schmidt also understands that his examination of "new habits of listening and reasoning"necessarily serve "as the condensing vehicles by which to explore the psychology, history,epistemology, politics, anatomy, and technology of modern perception," thus echoingHobsbawm's call for an examination of multiple parts to help us understand the process ofthe creation of the modern whole. Schmidt is equally a social historian in his treatment ofclasses and social groups, especially in his examination of ventriloquism, popular culture,and elite skepticism. He doesn't focus simply on the lower orders, qua the typical and rathermisleading definition of social history, nor just on elites, as intellectual historians aresometimes prone to do. Rather, he examines how different classes and social groupscontested the meaning of religious sounds, a point made with best effect in his chapter on"Sound Christians" where he explores the competing definitions of religious sound in thecontext of the supposedly visually oriented Enlightenment. "Evangelicals were noisy—totheir opponents appallingly so," maintains Schmidt, and he explains the roots and religioussalvation of the noise for lower orders and the way that antirevivalists such as CharlesChauncy used the charge of noise to construct and demarcate otherness, including womenand slaves. Although much of Schmidt's study is preoccupied with debates about the role ofsound and silence in divine revelation during the American Enlightenment and thereforeskewed somewhat toward elite thinkers—"the literati," as Schmidt styles them—he isnevertheless careful to place these debates within the wider context of American history andis rightly sensitive to the aurality of a diverse group of constituents. Thus, even thoughSchmidt describes his own work and that of the Annales School as "cultural history," itseems perfectly reasonable that Jon Butler, in his review of Schmidt's book, concludes withthe observation that Schmidt's study "opens an important question for any American social


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historian." 20

Work by Alain Corbin, the French historian of the senses, is even more redolent of thepractice of social history, as Hobsbawm defined it. But the connection isn't necessarilystraightforward. Corbin is quite critical of Lucien Febvre's notion of "mental equipment,"the modalities of perception in his conception of a history of the sensibilities. For Corbin, itis a "rigid concept which revealed the excessive reification for which the founder ofAnnales is today justifiably reproached." But Schmidt is surely right when he suggests thatCorbin's work, [End Page 170] while "richer and more nuanced" that the adumbratedframework offered by the early Annales school, seems to be a refinement of an a prioriinsight, not least because, as Corbin himself has written, "The attention paid to the regimeof sensory values and to the hierarchy of the representations and uses of the senses within aculture owes something to the intuitions of Lucien Febvre, imprecise though he may havebeen." Corbin's mild impatience with these early, tentative, and sweeping histories of thesenses—histories that paid little attention to sensorial hierarchies—is based principally onhis worries about the quality and nature of their evidence. In particular, Corbin strives for"the adoption of a more comprehensive viewpoint," one that involves the compilation ofdata on the senses coupled with the need to historicize that same data—which sounds, forexample, existed when and how they were produced and heard at certain moments intime—that is reminiscent of social history's quest. In The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor andthe French Social Imagination, Corbin examined the changing perceptions of the French,1750-1880, toward smells. Like early social historians, he framed his questions along classlines and the attendant perceptual authorities which were rooted in concrete illustrations:the creation of social and physical distance between "dangerous" smells/smelling people,the arrangement of public and private spaces, and the trumpeting of class authority reflectedin "the bourgeois control of the sense of smell" to score social others, usually the criminaland working poor. Corbin also examined the seeming capitulation to that marking by thosesame lower orders by considering their use of cologne and disinfectants, exactly the kind ofbalanced analysis that Hobsbawm called for when he argued that we need to examine theconservative, not just the revolutionary, aspects of working class culture. 21

In fact, Corbin marked himself as a social historian by echoing Hobsbawm's call for theneed to examine both the lower orders and elites, a tendency that at the time he wrote TheFoul and the Fragrant distinguished him from cultural historians, especially thoseinfluenced by postmodernism. As David Howes pointed out in his perceptive review ofCorbin's book: "It is this emphasis on writing history 'from below' as well as 'from above'(i.e. from the perspective of those subject to administrative regulations as well as those whocreate and enforce such regulations) that distinguishes Corbin's work from that of most ofhis contemporaries, particularly the Foucauldians." Corbin also used his class analysis tofurther and refine social history by considering the impact of smelling on notions of the self.The arrangement of private space and the use of personal, often individuated fragrancesentailed delimiting and isolating odors and so inaugurated among individuals a newencounter with their own body and even a new narcissism. This topic speaks to an issuenoted by Hobsbawm as important to the social historian's discipline—modernization—in aform that in no way figured in Hobsbawm's essay—the rise of notions of the self. For, asCorbin makes clear, the emergence of the self was itself part and parcel of the coming of


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modernity. 22

Some of the same investigative strategies Corbin used in his study of smell resonate in his1998 study on sound, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century FrenchCountryside. "In order to write the history of the bell," he argued, "one has constantly toshift levels of analysis. The emphasis is on locality, but bells also serve to announce eventsof significance in the national sphere, be it military mobilization, the declaration of war,"and the like. In short, maintains [End Page 171] Corbin, "A history of representations ofspace and of the social imagination can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining toauditory perception" not least because such perceptions give us access to "a deeper mode ofexistence" of past lives. 23

Corbin examines shifts in thresholds of hearing that were in some part class based, the"country people" clashing with the "people of the bourg" not only over the meaning of pealsand bells but on their timing and use. In this class conflict resided a dispute over religionand nationalism: "The leaders of the First Republic had sought to descacrilize theseinstruments, to limit their strictly religious uses, to curb their sensory ascendancy, and tomonopolize their solemnity. They also attempted to secularize and municipalize the peals,to subordinate them to the nation, and to insert them into a framework of citizenship" and,in effect, "to alter the prevailing pattern" of the culture of the senses and the socialhierarchies shaping that culture. Even though Corbin's study is in part an inquiry into"emotional power" and the control and manipulation of "modes of behavior," he eschews aheavily linguistic emphasis in favor of elucidating representations "based on material factsthat shed light on the physical attributes of sensory messages at the end of the Old Regime."As he remarks: "Without a detailed study of peals, we would not be able to grasp with anyprecision the rhythms of village life, the experienced shape of territories, the acquiescencein and resistance to the expression of hierarchies." 24

Although Corbin refers to his highly empirical study as a "cultural history"—presumablybecause it "consists of an endless series of exchanges"—the work reads very much like aThompsonian social history. Viz.: "Complaining of the discomfort caused by the din of bellswas a venerable urban tradition, and one that fit with the familiar theme of the drawbacksof town life. It formed part of a struggle of the elites, who were intent on imposing theirfastidious tastes and reducing noise to some sort of harmonious order, against 'rough music,'charivaris, and rackets, which all served to define the people." And, as with his work onolfaction, Corbin rooted his discussion of shifting mentalities (although he'd hate the word)and social representations in concrete evidence ranging from a detailed discussion of theprocess and mechanics of bell casting and an examination of the function of bells intimekeeping, to a fairly quantitative analysis of the numbers and types of bells used inFrance in the late nineteenth century. Corbin is as aware of the need for a good, positivistnarrative as he is of the analysis of his data: "My aim here has been to write a history of thisauditory landscape, to describe it in all its magnificence, and then to retrace the process bywhich it disintegrated." 25

While Corbin listened to the French countryside, others have listened to the American city.In his 1970 essay, Hobsbawm identified "urban history" among the "growing-points" for


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social history. While he thought that "Urban history...possesses a certain technologicallydetermined unity," it was equally clear "that it raises problems peculiarly germane to socialhistory, at least in the sense that the city can never be an analytical framework for economicmacro-history" principally because cities are not self contained, their economic and politicalfunctions necessarily articulate with one another, and they provide a microcosm of a raft ofinterrelated actions which range, for Hobsbawm, from the economic to the political to thepsychological. As he remarked: "urban history [End Page 172] must remain a centralconcern of historians of society, if only because it brings out—or can bring out—thosespecific aspects of societal change and structure with which sociologists and socialpsychologists are peculiarly concerned." 26

Along these lines, Raymond Smilor (an historian of the environment whose work focuseson the urban), first in his 1978 dissertation, then in a series of articles, argued that the period1893-1932 witnessed shifts in what was deemed productive and unproductive noise andsaw a reclaiming of the desirability of relative silence and quietude in northern U.S. cities.As Smilor shows, the sounds of machinery and of the working classes in the late nineteenthcentury often constituted the sounds of modernity to the ears of many northern urban elitesand were considered noise (necessary) to capitalist progress. Progressives, however,reconstituted the sound of modernity into the noise of modernity, painting not just theclamor of workers but also clanking machinery as atavistic, "inefficient," and premodern.They tried to deal with noisy modernity in all its forms by launching anti-noise crusades,legislating what constituted social noise and punishing transgressors, and by trying to makepeople and machines quieter. Reformers chastised working class discord, pressed milkmento use rubber on bottles and carts to quiet (and convey the impression of greater efficiencyof) their trade, and called for automobiles and various machines to be fitted with quiet ballbearings, gears, and better oil, all in an effort to dampen the excessive noise of the modern,the very thing northern elites of an earlier generation had applauded. 27 While Smilor is notespecially sensitive to the mentalities or perceptions of aurality, his work on legal attemptsto define noise, the political and economic implications of such efforts, the reaction againstmodernity, the role of consumption in combating noise, and the class tensions apparent indebates over what was necessary and unnecessary noise fit clearly within Hobsbawm'sdefinition of social history.

Emily Thompson's superb study, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acousticsand the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, treats the same period tackled bySmilor but benefits from a sure and sophisticated grasp of the science of acoustics.Thompson describes her book as "a history of aural culture," one charting "dramatictransformations in what people heard" and "equally significant changes in the ways thatpeople listened." Thompson's study uses listening to give depth beyond the eye, "to recovermore fully the texture of an era known as 'The Machine Age'," and to "comprehend morecompletely the experience of change."

Thompson follows Corbin and conceives of a soundscape as "simultaneously a physicalenvironment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a cultureconstructed to make sense of that world," and is less fond of the notion of a "soundscape"articulated by the musician R. Murray Schafer whose pioneering work was influenced by a


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concern with environmentalism and ecology. 28

Although Thompson's study is less sensitive to (though not entirely dismissive of) the class-based, contested nature of sound than some of the other works under consideration here, thebook is nonetheless a social history in some fundamental ways. Thompson claims, forexample, that a "soundscape's cultural aspects incorporate scientific and aesthetic ways oflistening, a listener's relationship to their environment, and the social circumstances thatdictate who gets to hear what." [End Page 173] Rather than focusing exclusively on how"social circumstances" dictated cultural norms of listening, Thompson is also alert to theinterplay between subjectivity and experience and changes in structure and society. Shelocates the changes in how people listened to changes in sound, themselves "the result oftechnological mediation" in which "Scientists and engineers discovered ways to manipulatetraditional materials of architectural construction in order to control the behavior of soundin space." Some of these changes in sound were incidental to the rise of industrial and urbanmodernity while others were a product of technological and architectural advances.Contingent on these material changes were "new trends in the culture of listening," andThompson uses shifts and advances in both to trace the emergence of modernity intwentieth-century America. For Thompson, the processes she uncovers were modern forseveral reasons. First, the sounds and the aesthetics of listening she describes wereconsidered efficient and involved a rejection of unnecessary sounds and an embrace of apurer, signal generated, direct sound. Second, such sounds were modern because they werealso commodities "in a culture increasingly defined by the act of consumption, and [were]evaluated by listeners who tuned their ears to the sound of the market." With advances inacoustic technology, consumers could buy quiet and (almost) banish certain types of noisefrom within their homes. Lastly, the kind of process Thompson describes was modernbecause "it was perceived to demonstrate man's technical mastery over his physicalenvironment." 29

While Thompson tends to focus on the work of scientists in their production of sound andmanipulation of acoustical spaces, she remains sensitive to the public implications of theProgressive anti-noise crusade, the timing and significance of the creation of quiet zonesand municipal authorities' reconfiguration of noise ordinances, and, like Smilor, she situatesher work within the broader understanding of how noise and its regulation and meaningwere contested by different constituencies and social groups. Central to her task is exactlywhat Hobsbawm saw as central to the field of social history. "Any exploration of asoundscape should ultimately inform a more general understanding of the society andculture that produced it," writes Thompson, and she applauds the breadth and depth thataural histories written by others have added to our understanding of religion, theEnlightenment, science, popular culture, antebellum American sectional identity, and"changing structures of religious and political authority." Thompson often, and rightly,treats society and culture as braided, making no intellectual distinction between the two.Following Douglas Kahn's admonition, Thompson tries to show that modernity must beheard as well as seen and she doesn't see vision and aurality in necessary tension. Her aim,instead, is to add listening and hearing to future investigations into the rise of modernityand, like Karl Marx, Thompson sees the interaction between materialism and consciousness


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as critical to investigations of the historical process. 30

Thanks to Raymond Smilor and Emily Thompson, we are beginning to get a sense of therole, use, and significance of sound in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America;thanks to work by Richard Cullen Rath, we now know a good deal about the sonic order ofseventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. In his 2001 dissertation, "Worlds Chantedinto Being: Soundways in Early America," Rath recovers colonial American modes ofhearing and soundways. He shows how sound shaped identities, delimited space andcommunity, [End Page 174] and located social relations of power and authority. Rath'sapproach is temporally and geographically broad (he covers the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies and examines "trans-oceanic," Atlantic connections) and he, like many socialhistorians, argues that "[g]ender, ethnicity, and social status" are integral to his examination.Although Rath is sensitive to the vocal, spoken world—and there has been quite a lotwritten on that topic—he is more interested in the paralinguistic aspects of early America.31

Early American soundways, argues Rath, "supplied a perceptual base for ways of thinkingthat have since been traded away in the acquisition of literacy and the promotion of printculture," and he is quite critical of work by literary critic Walter Ong and anthropologistJack Goody whose "narrow focus on orality is symptomatic of a sort of tunnel vision intothe past, where the audible world served only to set the stage for the rise of print and massliteracy after the Reformation." Although a reading of Foucault is important to Rath'sinvestigative schema, he seems equally influenced by Marshall McLuhan and is well aware,like Schmidt and Corbin, of the role of early Annales school historians, including LucienFebvre, in helping to identify a history of the senses. 32

Rath makes a compelling case that to continue to focus on orality is a tremendous disserviceto the historical actors who made and experienced a far broader range of sounds, and herightly shows that unhelpful, artificial distinctions between premodern (oral) and modern(literate) cultures do not withstand scrutiny when we begin to listen differently and todifferent sounds. Rath is interested in both the historically situated shift in modes ofperception in early America—from ear to eye—and the material as well as cultural basesfor that shift. He is particularly interested in the ways that sound was used to regulate andcreate sonic order that arranged social hierarchies and extended civil society's authority.Rath's comparative analysis of North American regions, an analysis based on not only adeep reading of the historical record but also an impressive understanding of architecturalacoustics, shows, for example, how bells were used to regulate civil society and markpublic space. He also shows how the spatial and acoustical properties of churches andmeetings houses reflected and reaffirmed political and social ordering. Moreover, in varioussections that would doubtless earn Hobsbawm's applause, Rath remains sensitive not onlyto elite uses of sound to establish social hierarchies but also to ways in which slaves andNative Americans used aurality, musical instruments, and an understanding of acoustics toboth police their own environments and resist authority (his examination of the meaningand almost militaristic use of sound during the 1739 Stono Rebellion is particularlyfascinating). In short, although Rath tends to slight the aurality associated with economicdevelopment, his meticulous attention to the physical and symbolic significance of sound


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and hearing, his ability to connect culture with politics, and his drive to consider elites andnonelites gives his study the tenor of a social history project. 33

Even work on the history of the senses that advertises itself as cultural history seems toborrow much from the kind of social history methodologies and habits of inquiry noted byHobsbawm. In their pioneering study, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, ConstanceClassen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott (historians and anthropologists), introducetheir study with the sentence, "Smell is [End Page 175] a social phenomenon, investedwith particular meanings and values by different cultures" (the emphasis is theirs). They goon: "Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies and political orders;they can enforce social structures or transgress themBut smell is repressed in the modernWest, and its social history ignored." They, aim, in short, to rescue this social history. Infact, the inclusion of the word "cultural" in the book's title and the text seems to serve lessan intellectual function than a stylistic one for "cultural" and "social" are often usedinterchangeably throughout their study. And while some of their thinking is plainlyinfluenced by the protocols of anthropological inquiry and forms of expression, the authors'determination to examine smell as both an objective and subjective phenomenon, theirinvestigation into the politics of smell, and their ability to locate with some precision theolfactory dimensions of class, seems reminiscent of the kind of social history Hobsbawmhad in mind. 34

Precisely the same seems true of James H. Johnson's penetrating study, Listening in Paris,subtitled, "A Cultural History." Among the authors considered here, Johnson is among themost sensitive to the implications and nature of his methodology. Johnson is not hostage toany given method and his choice of evidence and his choice of investigative strategies aredriven less by a desire to mark his study as a particular kind of historical inquiry—culturalor otherwise—than by a need to answer important and carefully formulated historicalquestions. His principal question is: "Why did French audiences become silentWhy, overthe hundred years between 1750 and 1850, did audiences stop talking and start listening?"Because Johnson shows that the answer to this question is remarkably complicated, andbecause he understands that its answer resides in a thorough exploration of "everythingfrom the physical features of the [music] hall to the musical qualities of the works," he isnecessarily (and refreshingly) eclectic in his choice and use of evidence. Although Johnsondescribes his work as a "cultural history of listening," by placing listeners' at story's center,he is sensitive to their "aesthetic and social expectations," themselves shaped by politics andsociety as well as physical and material changes in the use and composition of space. "Allpublic expression of musical response—even silence—is inevitably social," he argues, andhis work never loses sight of "two broad categories to understand the political and socialinfluences upon public responses to music, the structural and the personal." Johnson'selaboration sounds very much like Hobsbawm: "On the largest scale, structures of society—monarchical, aristocratic, meritocratic, democratic—produce patterns of behavior thatunderlie everyday interactions." "To these structures," he continues, "can be attributedcertain patterns of behavior during musical performances, patterns that occasionally spillover into the aesthetic and influence how the music is heard." Essentially, Johnson attemptsto "understand behavioral shifts as part of larger social transformations." Situating hismethod between "Macauley and Foucault," he is as sensitive to the importance of physical


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space and social structure in shaping and reflecting cultural beliefs as he is to showing themeaning of cultural structures of personal experience. Moreover, to answer his principalquestion, Johnson takes the broadest possible view of French society, treating "everythingfrom the latrines overflowing in eighteenth-century halls, to the threat of decapitation forinsufficient patriotism during the Revolution," a scope that invites detailed consideration of[End Page 176] the musical tastes and performances of the rich, "the masses," culminatingin an examination of "the social roots of silence." Johnson is always careful to providedetailed context for his discussion of shifts in listening and he is never shy of offeringnumbers, reviews of economic trends, and changes in class composition to that end. 35

IV

Social historians, then, have been instrumental in shaping and investigating the history ofthe senses not least because they tend to work with a habit of mind and within aninvestigative idiom that leads them to pursue topics beyond conventional disciplinaryboundaries. Moreover, social historians' tendency to see history not just from the top downbut also from the bottom up has given some of their investigative questions a thrust thatchallenges naturalized, dominant ways of understanding the past. Practicing bottom up aswell as top down history helps question the predominance of the rational gaze of the eliteeye and takes seriously the supposedly "lower" senses of smell, sound, taste, and touch. Ifhistorical investigation is to free itself from the Enlightenment, visualist trope, we could doworse that turn to social history, not least because the investigative leanings of the fieldhave helped produce some superb, innovative studies that have already made the leap fromthe eye. Such a reorientation could prove of immense, long term significance for historians.

There is still much to do, of course, and the history of the senses still has a very long way togo. 36 Surprisingly, one of Hobsbawm's laments, as he expressed it in his 1997 preface tothe reprinted essay, was his failure in 1970 to appreciate the central role women's historywould play in the unfolding of social history. Curiously, women figure very little inmonographic work on the history of the senses. Although I endeavored to explore theaurality of antebellum American women in my own work and while Richard Rath considersgender, there is still a dearth of work on the gendered dynamics of, for example, aurality, letalone smell, taste, and touch. 37

Moreover, social histories of the senses have still to inform even the most innovativecultural histories—I'm thinking especially of whiteness studies—some of which suffer froman unwitting visualism that in some important ways limits their larger explanative powerabout the meaning of "race", the ways in which it was defined, and the depth of Americanracism. With few exceptions, such work tends to measure and evaluate race and whitenessthrough the eyes of historical actors, and, with the exception of work on minstrelsy, rarelypauses to consider in any explicit or systematic fashion ways in which whiteness, blackness,and race were mediated and constructed through sound, smell, touch, and taste. 38

Indeed, and more generally, judging by their relative silence on the other senses, somehistorians remain seemingly unaware that they write the past through the eyes of actors. 39


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More often than not, the most that is ever done in this regard is the inclusion of other sensesto add flare and perceived panache to the narrative, especially, for example, in work on theU.S. Civil War where sound makes an appearance, and a fleeting one at that, via cannonbooms and soldiers' screams. Indeed, one of the few exceptions, an immensely interestingbook by Charles D. Ross, Civil War Acoustic Shadows, shows us what an aural [End Page177] and acoustic history of the American Civil War sounds like when written by someonewho is not a social historian (Ross teaches physics). Ross' book has a lot to recommend itfor it tells us about the military consequences of sound shadows, the atmospheric andphysical distortion of sounds, during some important Civil War battles. While it is still truethat social historians need to do a much better job of integrating military history into theiranalyses, I think it is also the case that inquirers into military history would be well advisedto examine the social aspects of the military engagements they examine with such exquisitedetail. Such is the case with Ross' book, which, while fascinating (and, to my mind,convincing) in its explanation of some Confederate and Union losses and wins, fails to gomuch further than a strictly military, tactical, and strategic consideration of Civil Warsounds. From Ross, we get little idea of how sounds on the battlefield affected (literally andfiguratively) sounds on the home front, what meanings battlefield sounds carried forsoldiers beyond their military implications, or how slaves used the sounds and silences ofbattle to shape their own strategies of escape. 40

That much said, the way that social history has influenced the writing of the history of thesenses is clear. We can gauge its impact by showing what the history of the senses is not inits current state. Emily Thompson, for example, could easily have written (a radicallydecontextualized) history of technological changes in the history of sound and acoustics.She didn't, preferring instead (and quite rightly) to link technology with mentality andchanges in society, exactly what Hobsbawm called for in his essay. Likewise, Leigh EricSchmidt could easily have written a purely intellectual history of sound and religion with aheavy concentration on highbrow religious discourse as expressed by theologians. He didn'tand instead tried to examine the relationship between high and lowbrow religious beliefsand trace the aurality of different classes and social groups.

Histories of the senses also pose some important methodological questions and shouldprompt us to revisit some fundamental issues about "doing" history. For example, shouldthe historian of smell or sound try to actually recreate or experience the odors and noises ofthe past? Is it actually possible to do so and, if so, is it also desirable? In short, can we reallysmell and hear (let alone touch, taste, and see) the past or are we more limited in what wecan achieve? For some historians of the senses, visiting extant sites of investigation—inHillel Schwartz's case, going to living museums to actually hear the decibel levels ofblacksmithing; in Peter Charles Hoffer's case, visiting modern Salem, Massachusetts in aneffort to understand the sensory dimensions of that world in 1692—has been relevant totheir work. As Hoffer remarks, "If we assume also that we have the same perceptualapparatus as the people we are studying in the past, and can still sense the world as theydid," we are "another step closer to our objective." In this way, we might overcome thelimitations of our reliance on printed evidence, which we use to report a highly mediatedrepresentation of the sense of the past (that is, what particular people thought they heardand smelled and saw as opposed to what they really smelled or heard or saw.) That much


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said, even if we grant that we share the "same perceptual apparatus" of those we study(hardly a certainty), can we be sure that our hearing or smelling or seeing or touching ortasting is an accurate proxy for every historical actor or group we investigate? Did people ofdifferent classes, races, genders, sections, locales, hear [End Page 178] the same sound,smell the same odor in, say, 1840 in precisely the same way and with the same meaning that"we" do now (and who, it is worth asking, is "we" in this instance)? Or should historians tryto remain highly sensitive to context so that we can begin to understand why, for example,an antebellum southern slaveholder and a northern abolitionist could hear precisely thesame sound but attribute radically different meanings to it? In other words, would it behelpful to distinguish between the ways in which sounds were produced and the ways inwhich they were consumed? 41

In answering these questions, historians of the senses must pay special care to defining theiraims, framing their methodology, and shaping their forms of presentation. If they are out todescribe the objective sensory worlds of the past, is the historical narrative, print itself, upto that task? Or should we begin to consider alternative and complementary media andpresentation including, for example, compact disks or audio files to accompany our books?('Touch and feel' books, 'scratch and sniff' pages, and 'lickable' print, too?) If the historian ofthe senses aims mainly to examine past peoples' perceptions of the senses and reveal towhich uses they were put, perhaps the traditional monograph and print will suffice (after all,it is worth noting that some historical actors themselves mediated a good deal of what theysensed through print, too, and sometimes only rarely experienced in any direct way thesounds and smells they described in writing). We might also ask, to what extent is itdesirable to treat both the subjective and objective worlds of sense and perception in asingle work? With all these questions, social historians are well advised to consider thefindings of some thoughtful intellectual historians and students of the history of medicinewhose work shows how very malleable the senses have proven in the past. As somemedical historians have shown, senses could be taught, ears trained, noses directed, andtouches educated so that significant changes in, for example, the meaning, use, andunderstanding of bodily sounds could take place quite quickly. Similarly, intellectualhistorians have detailed changes in peoples' understanding of hearing, listening, sound, andacoustics, and have explained how these shifts were indexed to developments in philosophyand technology. Such work is important and deserves careful consideration as historians ofthe senses ponder how best to recapture the senses and perceptions of senses. 42

While the recent enthusiasm for histories of the senses shouldn't preclude substantive,meaningful discussion about methodology, it seems clear that the promise of sensoryhistory is great and its implications could be very far reaching indeed, far beyond aparadigm shift within a specific field (as with, say, "republicanism"), with the potential toinfluence all historical writing. 43 If we take the aforementioned work seriously, futureresearch in all fields will begin to include hearing, smell, taste, and touch in both itsanalytical formulations and narrative techniques. The sudden flurry of books on sound andhistorical aurality suggests that historians will soon begin to include explicitly the othersenses in virtually any topic under consideration. 44 Social historians, I believe, will beinstrumental in that inclusion.


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My conclusion, put simply? It is a good moment to be a social historian.

Department of HistoryColumbia, SC 29208-0001[End Page 179]

EndnotesI remain grateful for fleeting but helpful conversations with my colleagues, Ron Atkinson,Larry Glickman, and Paul Johnson, about social and cultural history and the direction ofthis essay. Thanks also to the members of the History Department at the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill who heard a version of this essay on March 21, 2003. Theircomments were instructive.

1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Martin Milligan, trans.(Buffalo, 1988), 108-109.

2. Eric Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," in his On History (NewYork, 1997), 93. The essay was originally presented at a conference on Historical StudiesToday in Rome in 1970 and subsequently published in Daedalus, 100 (1971): 20-45. In1980, Peter N. Stearns also used Hobsbawm's essay as a starting point and found that, forsome reasons different to those offered in this essay, there was good cause for socialhistorians to be enthusiastic about the importance of their work. See Peter N. Stearns,"Toward a Wider Vision: Trends in Social History," in Michael Kammen, ed., The PastBefore Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, 1980), 205.

3. On intellectual history, see, for example, the essays in Charles Burnett, Michael Fend,and Penelope Gouk, eds., The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgementfrom Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London, 1991). On the history of medicine, seeW. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge, 1993). Foran historian of aurality who is indebted to linguistic analysis, see Paul Carter, The SoundIn-Between: Voice, Space, Performance (New South Wales, 1992).

4. Of course, it may be objected that all historians strive for such interrelatedness.Admittedly, some political history increasingly tends to treat its topic as "political culture,"but even in the best works, the operations of the political system, even broadly conceived,provide the determinative engine affecting political culture and behavior. Likewise witheconomic history. Though some of the very best work by economic historians essaysintegration of the political and social into analysis and narrative, there is still the powerfultemptation for economic matters to drive the story. When Hobsbawm wrote of theaspiration of a braided form of historical inquiry, I think he meant something other than thedrive toward a total history that, as Lynn Hunt remarks, "loses all specificity." Hobsbawmwas, as his own work shows, keenly aware of the need for context and what he meant was


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the need to see beyond artificial categories of economic, intellectual, or political history. SeeLynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), 3.

5. Because I'm interested in the impact of the practice of social history, I'll limit mydiscussion to some of the work by historians who have written books or dissertations andnecessarily (if reluctantly) exclude significant work by associated inquirers whosemethodologies and questions are sometimes informed by a different set of assumptions.Excluded here is excellent work by Bruce R. Smith, a student of English literature andauthor of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor(Chicago, 1999); Douglas Kahn (Art and Art History), author of Noise, Water, Meat: AHistory of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, 1999); Jonathan Edward Sterne (Media Studiesand Communication), and author of "The Audible Past: Modernity, Technology, and theCultural History of Sound" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1999).(Duke University Press has just published a revised version of Sterne's dissertation, entitledThe Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.); and Jacques Attali (aneconomist), author of the influential, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, BrianMassumi, trans., (Minneapolis, 1985). For a helpful exchange on the writing of auralhistory see, Bruce R. Smith, "How Sound is Sound History? A Response to Mark Smith,"and my "Echoes in Print: Method and Causation in Aural History," both in Journal of TheHistorical Society, 2 (Summer/Fall 2002): 307-315, 317-336. [End Page 180]

6. George H. Roeder, Jr., "Coming to Our Senses," Journal of American History, 81 (Dec.1994): 1113, 1116-1122. See also, Frederic Jameson, "Foreword" to Attali, Noise, vii.

7. For a perceptive evaluation of recent work on aurality, see Douglas Kahn, "SoundAwake," Australian Review of Books (July 2000): 21-22.

8. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century FrenchThought (Berkeley, 1993), 45, 66-69. On the effect of Jay's work, see the perceptivecomments by Steven Connor, "The Modern Auditory I," in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting theSelf: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), 204. See, also, thehelpful critiques in Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in Historyand across Cultures (London, 1993). On vision, see David Michael Levin, ed., Modernityand the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley, 1993); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer:On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990); Kate Flint, TheVictorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2000); and Randolph Starn, "SeeingCulture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince," in Hunt, The New Cultural History, 205-232.On how some historians unwittingly tend to examine the past through the eyes of actors andthereby naturalize the dominance of vision by not considering explicitly the other senses,see my "Echoes in Print." On Ong and McLuhan, see Walter J. Ong, "The ShiftingSensorium," in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology ofthe Senses, David Howes, ed. (Toronto, 1991), 29-30. For a thoughtful treatment ofMcLuhan especially, see David Howes, "Sensorial Anthropology," in ibid., 170-173 esp.See too Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man(Toronto, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (NewYork, 1988); Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and


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Religious History (New Haven, 1967).

9. While Hobsbawm correctly predicted the continued vitality of social history, he perhapsoverstated the extent to which historians borrowing the basic insights of social historywould want to call themselves social historians. Such was Hobsbawm's optimism that heremarked, "Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not wantto disclaim it today." Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 93.

10. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present,38 (Dec.1967): 56-97; Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedomin the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2001), esp. 319, n.2. Most work on timekeeping and timeconsciousness is attuned to sound and hearing. See, for example, the works examined andcited in my "Old South Time in Comparative Perspective," American Historical Review,101 (Dec. 1996): 1432-1469. For commentary on my work on sound as cultural history, seethe thoughtful and engaged comments by Mitchell Snay, "Cultural History and the Comingof the Civil War: A Response to Mark Smith," Journal of The Historical Society 2(Summer/Fall 2002): 297-305.

11. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 71-72, 87.

12. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 75. See also Stearns,"Toward a Wider Vision," 210. On the Annales school and the model of total history seeJoyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York,1994), 82-83 esp.

13. Stearns, "Toward a Wider Vision," 207-209, 212. Like Hobsbawm, Stearns also detectedthe drive for a flexible and fluid interpretation embedded in social history, pointing to howsocial historians such as Eugene Genovese had made excellent use of the Gramscian theoryof hegemony to explain the "enmeshing of dominator and dominated alike" and in thelooser formulations that encouraged a fuller treatment of "semi-independent, [End Page181] identifiable subcultures that allow popular groups some independent basis for reactionto larger systems and processes" and the examination of groups that "coexist within largerstructures of power" that were not defined simply in terms of class conflict but also ethnicityand gender. All illustrate social history's tendency towards inclusiveness and its attention tointerplay between groups and structures. Stearns, "Toward a Wider Vision," 216-218,228-230. On social history and the early Annales school as largely quantitative, seeAppleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 86-87, 148 esp. "In many waysthe recent interest in the history of 'mentalities' marks an even more direct approach tocentral methodological problems of social history," maintained Hobsbawm, elaborating: "Ithas been largely stimulated by the traditional interest in 'the common people' of many whoare drawn to social history. It has dealt with the individually inarticulate, undocumented andobscure, and is often indistinct from an interest in their social movements." "This very fact,"he went on, "has encouraged a specifically dynamic treatment of culture by historians,superior to such studies as those of the 'culture of poverty' by anthropologists, though notuninfluenced by their methods and pioneering experience." Hobsbawm then hit on a


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fundamental methodological point about the social historian's treatment of culture: "Thenature of sources for such study has rarely allowed the historian to confine himself tosimple factual study and exposition. He has been obliged from the outset to constructmodels, that is, to fit his partial and scattered data into coherent systems, without whichthey would be little more than anecdotal," viz.: "Edward Thompson's concept of the 'moraleconomy"' and "my own analysis of social banditry." All in all, "the history of 'mentalities'has been useful in introducing something analogous to the discipline of the socialanthropologists into history, and its usefulness is very far from exhausted." Hobsbawm,"From Social History to the History of Society," 88-89.

14. Penelope Gouk explains the same concern with interplay eloquently and incisively inher essay, "Beyond Rationality? The Paradox of Writing About Non-Verbal Ways ofKnowing," Intellectual News: Review of the International Society for Intellectual History, 8(Summer 2000): 44-57. In this essay, Gouk traces the trajectory behind the writing of herbook, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven,1999). Text-based intellectual history, she argues, proved too limiting to explain fully therelationship among music, magic, technology, and the history of ideas and she illustrateshow these and other matters were "actually connected to each other, and at the same time,constituting a significant part of the broader cultural environment." Throughout both theessay and her book, Gouk blends strictly intellectual history with a deep knowledge ofmusic, acoustics, and changes in technology and philosophical ideas. Of these ideas, sheinsistently asks, "what material, social, technical, and intellectual resources were necessaryfor their production and circulation?" She also ponders whether or not the historicalmonograph is best suited to conveying the answers to these questions. See ibid., 44-45.

15. Writing in 1980, Robert Darnton made a distinction between social history, culturalhistory, and "intellectual history proper" (intellectual history being "the study of systematicthought, usually in philosophical treatises;" social history as "the study of ideologies andidea diffusion;" and cultural history taken to include "world view and collectivementalités") that social historians, following Hobsbawm, would reject as too delimited andcertainly not reflective of their actual practice. Thus, when Darnton rightly pointed to aperceived convergence between social and intellectual history—"the social dimensions ofthought"—in intellectual history he was, in fact, describing what social historians normallytake as their principal remit. Robert Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," inKammen, ed., The Past Before Us, 337, 341. But Darnton is right to point to shifts withinsocial history from a heavily quantitative to a textual, "anthropological mode" ofunderstanding, especially in the work of E. P. Thompson who did indeed lurch towardanthropology but without abandoning his concern for the economic, political, andintellectual context of consciousness. Thompson was a social historian who used a varietyof evidence—economic, political, and cultural—to drive home his points about workingclass identity. See ibid., 345-346. See, too, Gouk, "Beyond Rationality." [End Page 182]

16. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 218(quotation), 219.

17. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 220-221 (quotations), 223.


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See also Hunt, The New Cultural History, 4-5, and 10 for her own misgivings about culturalreductionism. On Thompson's worries, see his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays(New York, 1978). Critics of quantitative social history can point to work thatnonquantitative social historians would also find disquieting not simply because of itsstatistical, sociological bent but because such work seems divorced from Hobsbawm'sunderstanding of social history. See, for example, Larry J. Griffin and Marcel van derLinden, eds., New Methods for Social History (Cambridge, 1999).

18. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 82, 86. Hobsbawmunderstood that social history is difficult to write effectively, and even E. P. Thompson'sMaking of the English Working Class "is no more than a great torso," even though it didmuch to further the writing of social history. Difficult did not mean undesirable, however,and Hobsbawm plainly called for social history to continue along this trajectory.

19. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the AmericanEnlightenment (Cambridge, 2000), 18; Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in theSixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, Beatrice Gottlieb, trans. (Cambridge, 1982),423-442; Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640: An Essay inHistorical Psychology, R. E. Hallmark, trans. (New York, 1976). For a brief discussion ofthe influence of the Annales school and its limitations, see Jay, Downcast Eyes, 34-35 esp.

20. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 38-77 esp., quotations on 66, 9, and, on ventriloquism, seech.4. For Butler's comment, see his review, "Listening for God in America," Reviews inAmerican History, 29 (Dec. 2001): 500.

21. Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, Jean Birrell,trans. (Cambridge, 1995), 181-182, 183; Schmidt, Hearing Things, 18; Alain Corbin, TheFoul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Miriam Kochan, RoyPorter, and Christopher Prendergast, trans. (Cambridge, 1986), 141, 199, 231-232, 94-96,140; Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 88.

22. David Howes, "Scent and Sensibility," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 13 (1989): 93;Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 77-85 esp.

23. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century FrenchCountryside, Martin Thom, trans. (New York, 1998), xi-xii.

24. Corbin, Village Bells, xv, xvii, 3, 288-289, 4-5, 288. Although Corbin is appreciative ofthe value of studying "rough music" (along the lines of E. P. Thompson) and while hedoesn't disagree with the interpretative thrust of such an inquiry, he argues that theemotional power of bells gives us access to deep collective identities. See ibid., 288; E. P.Thompson, "Rough Music," in his Customs in Common (London, 1991), 467-538.

25. Corbin, Village Bells, 289, 299, 80-93, 110-118, 391-392, 306-307.

26. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," 83-85.


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27. Raymond W. Smilor, "Confronting the Industrial Environment: The Noise Problem inAmerica, 1893-1932" (Ph.D diss., University of Texas, 1978); "Cacophony at 34th and 6th:The Noise Problem in America, 1900-1930," American Studies, 18 (1977): 23-38; "PersonalBoundaries in the Urban Environment: The Legal Attack on Noise: 1865-1930,Environmental Review, 3 (1979): 24-36; "Toward an Environmental Perspective: TheAnti-Noise Campaign, 1883-1932," in Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform inAmerican Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin, 1980): 135-151. See also Bernard [End Page 183]Hibbitts, "Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration ofAmerican Legal Discourse," 16 Cardozo Law Review 229 (1994) available online athttp://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/metaint.html (15/1/00). On the northern celebration of thesounds of modernity, see my Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, chs 4-7.

28. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and theCulture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, 2002), 1. While Schafer's concernwas to sensitize our ears to effect changes in public policy and while the associatedinvestigators in the World Soundscape Project tend to record existing sounds in order toprotect them from future cacophonies, Schafer's conceptualization of a soundscape—andassociated soundmarks—was, in essence, formulated along historical lines and took intoaccount the kind of psychological, material, and cultural aural and auditory interactionsdealt with by both Corbin and Thompson. See R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: OurSonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, 1994), 3-12; Smith, Listening toNineteenth Century America, 262-265.

29. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 1-4, ch.5.

30. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, ch.4, 9-11. Thompson notes that she has been"particularly inspired by the material histories of Wolfgang Schivelbusch" (329, n21.)Douglas Kahn, "Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed," in Douglas Kahn andGregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde(Cambridge, 1992), 1-29. See also Hillel Schwartz, "Beyond Tone and Decibel: The Historyof Noise," Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 1998): B8.

31. Richard Cullen Rath, "Worlds Chanted into Being: Soundways in Early America"(Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2001), 6, 7. A revised version of Rath's dissertation isscheduled for publication by Cornell University Press in the fall of 2003. Our understandingof the senses in early America promises to be greatly enriched and expanded with thepublication, also in the fall of 2003, of Peter Charles Hoffer's study, Sensory Worlds inEarly America (The Johns Hopkins University Press). Professor Hoffer kindly provided mewith a draft of the introduction to his book, which, from my reading, also seems influencedby social history (hereinafter cited as "Introduction.") A full evaluation of Hoffer'simportant study obviously awaits its publication, however. For a sampling of recent workon speech, see, for example, Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations inEarly America (Princeton, 1999); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics ofSpeech in Early New England (New York, 1998); and Christopher Grasso, A SpeakingAristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (ChapelHill, 1999).


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32. Rath, "Worlds Chanted into Being," 3-4, 5, n.5, 10. While acknowledging some ofMcLuhan's clumsier formulations, Rath nonetheless (and rightly) suggests that McLuhan'swork was instrumental in alerting us to the notion that senses have a history and that oneway to approach that history is through an examination in the shift in the ratio of the sensesas a consequence of the invention and dissemination of print. See ibid., 11, 14, 92-93, 96,esp. n.3.

33. Rath, "Worlds Chanted into Being," 24, 30, 94, 90-107, 117, 160-178, 191-194.

34. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural Historyof Smell (London, 1994), [ii], 3, 7, 8.

35. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995), 1-4, 6,228-229.

36. It is also worthwhile remembering that insights on the history of the senses can begleaned from some unexpected quarters. As Anthony Synnott explains in a brief butinsightful essay on "Puzzling over the Senses: From Plato to Marx," many thinkers [EndPage 184] were aware of the role of hearing, touch, smell, and taste in human affairs and, assuch, have something to teach us about our own often unwitting acceptance of the notion ofmodernity as an exclusively visualist aesthetic. In fact, we have a good deal to learn bylooking backwards and social historians, with their interest in interplay, breadth, depth, andmultiplicity, are well suited to reading and rereading pre twentieth-century texts for clues onhow to venture beyond the eye. While we can leave aside the important discussion abouthow Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx, amongothers, ranked the senses—vision nearly always came out on top because of its associationwith reason, the other senses nearly always being more visceral and animalistic—it is worthpausing to consider briefly how one of these thinkers understood the senses. Of thesethinkers, only Marx, arguably a social historian of the first order, offered an explicitincorporation of the senses into a model of historical development and, in the process,ventured a resounding rejection of most Western thinking on the topic that touted theprimacy of the eye. His most pronounced comments on the senses are in Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he examines the impact of capitalism on the senseof self. Marx's observations on the senses occur in the context of his discussion on the"social mode of existence," alienation, and the degradation of the senses as a result of theemergence of private property under capitalism. For Marx, "man is affirmed in his objectiveworld not only in the act of thinking but with all his senses" and he claimed that the"forming of the five senses is a labor of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses isa labor of the entire history of the world down to the present." Thus, Marx suggested that anunderstanding of the history of human experience must take into account the mediation ofthe world in its full sensory capacity and to understand how historical developments, inparticular the ascendancy of capitalist social and economic relations, shaped the forming ofthose senses and how they impacted on notions of self, freedom, and dependency. SeeAnthony Synnott, "Puzzling over the Senses: From Plato to Marx," The Varieties of SensoryExperience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, in David Howes, ed.(Toronto, 1991), 70. See also, Jay, Downcast Eyes, ch.1; Adam Smith, "Of the External


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Senses," in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects, W. P. D. Wightman, ed. (Indianapolis,1982), 135-168. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 103, 108-109. Forthe influence of Marx's observations, see Sterne, "Audible Past," 33, 35-36, 34, 28, 38-39.

37. Hobsbawm, "From Social History," 71. An exception is Jane Kamensky, Governing theTongue, although, as Rath shows, her work focuses on words and speech, not what Rathcalls paralinguistic sound.

38. The sensory construction of race in southern history is something I address in my nextstudy, Sensing Race: From Slavery to Integration in the American South. One of the onlyhistorians to have examined the evolution of racial consciousness and racism through thenose is Winthrop D. Jordan in his still remarkable study, Black Over White: AmericanAttitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 256-257, 459, 492, 501, 518.Note, too, the perceptive remarks on race and touch by Sander Gilman, "Touch Sexualityand Disease," in Bynum and Porter, eds., Medicine and the Five Senses, 215-224 esp. Theliterature on whiteness is voluminous, although critical engagement with it, less so. A goodstarting point for both a review of the literature, a critical evaluation of it, and some sturdydefenses of the concept is in "Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians'Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001): 1-92. Onminstrelsy, see, especially, Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the AmericanWorking Class (New York, 1995).

39. See my "Echoes in Print."

40. Charles D. Ross, Civil War Acoustic Shadows (Shippensburg, 2001). See also his "Ssh!Battle in Progress!" Civil War Times Illustrated, 35 (Dec. 1996): 56-62. Earl J. Hess isanother exception and offers some helpful if brief observations on the meaning of sounds toUnion soldiers. See his The Union Soldier: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence,1997), 15-18, 28, 46, 112-113. Some of these issues concerning the literal impact and [EndPage 185] metaphorical meaning of Civil War sounds are addressed in my "Of Bells,Booms, Sounds, and Silences: Listening to the Civil War South," in The War Was You andMe: Civilians and the American Civil War, Joan Cashin, ed. (Princeton, 2002): 9-34; Smith,Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, chs. 8, 9. I hasten to note my own shortcominghere—I do not consider the important questions addressed by Ross and instead treatperceptions of sounds during the war. For social history that examines military eventswithin a larger social framework, see J. Tracy Power, Lee's Miserables: Life in the Army ofNorthern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill, 1998); Cheryl AnneWells, "Civil War Time(s): Temporality, Identity, and Experience in America, 1861-1865"(Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2002).

41. Schwartz, "Beyond Tone and Decibel"; Hoffer, "Introduction." It should be noted thatHoffer's introduction offers a very thoughtful discussion of these issues, one worthy ofgreater consideration than I can offer here. Similarly, I fully expect Schwartz's forthcomingbook to examine such questions and advance our understanding even further. My ownposition is outlined in my debate with Bruce R. Smith. See "How Sound is Sound History?A Response to Mark Smith," and my "Echoes in Print," 307-315, 317-336.


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42. See, for example, Malcolm Nicolson, "The Introduction of Percussion and Stethoscopyto Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh," in Bynum and Porter, eds., Medicine and the FiveSenses, 134-153; Charles Burnett, "Sound and Its Perception in the Middle Ages," inBurnett, Fend, and Gouk, eds., The Second Sense, 43-69; Penelope Gouk, "Some EnglishTheories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century: Before and After Descartes," in ibid.,95-113; D. R. Woolf, "Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of thePast in Renaissance England," Albion, 18, no.2 (1986): 159-193.

43. Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of AmericanHistory, 79 (June, 1993): 11-38.

44. For an excellent overview on the limited inclusion of sensory history in collegetextbooks, and for hints that things are beginning to change, albeit modestly, see Roeder,"Coming to Our Senses," 1112-1122. As more explicit work is done on the history of thesenses, I suspect that the findings of specialists will percolate into new textbooks, which isentirely appropriate since the more we ignore the smells, sounds, tastes, and textures of thepast, the most we are simply repeating a trope and denying ourselves and our students to themultiple dimensions of the past.


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mark m. (mark michael) smith - making sense of social history - journal of social history 37:1

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