| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard Cullen Rath. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 227. $32.50.

Thunder and lightning: seventeenth-century Americans, believing that thunder killed, sought to understand this sound and control it with others. In the eighteenth century, their attention shifted to lightning. Richard Cullen Rath argues that early Americans employed systems of perception that afforded greater weight to aural input and stimuli than those used currently by their modern, more visually oriented descendants. The early modern world may have been quieter than ours, but its soundscapes were as culturally complex as the sightscapes that gradually assumed an ascendant role in ordering daily life. These propositions are easy to state but immensely difficult to prove or explain. Rath's achievement lies in recovering through persuasive research a variety of early American soundscapes, some originating in understandings of natural phenonema such as thunder, others created by human agency as in bell-ringing or drumming. The cumulative effect of Rath's lively presentation will likely leave readers feeling that they have indeed eavesdropped on remote worlds.

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