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the strange STILLNESS OF THE PAST: TOWARD AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF SOUND AND NOISE
PETER A. COATES
| "TODAY'S HISTORY COMES deodorized," commented Roy Porter in his foreword to Alain Corbin's path-breaking book, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination.1 Historical studies in Europe and North America, reflecting general trends within the humanities and social sciences and the dominant tendencies of our wider culture and society, have long been resolutely visual in their focus. Thanks to studies like Corbin's, the scent of the past has become a bit sharper. "Smelly Old History," for example, is a popular series of children's books from Oxford University Press. In a bid to overcome the sensory limitations of traditional print media, the "scratch and sniff" method is designed to allow youngsters to recover the rank whiff of a Roman legionnaire's armpit (Roman Aromas) and the pungent stench of a nineteenth-century tavern's latrine (Victorian Vapors), though, in practice, they all smell pretty much the same—like cheap perfume. |
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Yet from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century—how hard it is to avoid images that privilege sight over other senses—the past seems more audible than aromatic.2 Even a decade ago, history came largely soundproofed as well as deodorized. But a welcome spate of publications over the past five years has thrust sound into the forefront of sensory history.3 As Mark Smith, a social historian in the vanguard of the current wave of aural history, remarked in 2004: "Historians are listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude. Once focused on just the history of music and musicology, historians of aurality now consider sound in all its variety."4 Yet environmental historians are absent from the emerging cadre of sound historians that is challenging the visual bias of scholarly and popular culture. |
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Only one of the twenty-one essays in Mark Smith's state-of-the-art anthology, Hearing History: A Reader, which ranges over the past thirty years, represents the work of an environmental historian—an essay on early twentieth-century American efforts to combat urban noise published nearly thirty years ago.5 Routledge's ambitious multi-volume Encyclopedia of World Environmental History has no entries for sound or noise. It is not altogether surprising, then, that Smith, who specializes in the study of slavery, should leave environmental themes and environmental history out of his calculations, referring to how the denizens of the antebellum United States "heard the articulated and intimately related principal political, economic, and social developments." Nor is it particularly remarkable, in view of the environmental historian's limited engagement with auditory matters, that Smith does not specify environmental history when, in his call for a multifaceted approach to aural history, he emphasizes that "there is no compelling reason for historians to treat the history of sound as a cultural, political, or economic history project."6 But there could be an additional reason why Smith does not specifically mention environmental history. He may feel that social historians already are doing a decent enough job of covering the territory. |
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