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Hearing American History
Richard Cullen Rath
| I came to the history of sound and hearing by chance as an undergraduate. I was reading Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic and David D. Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment for a class that covered folk beliefs in old and New England. When I started working with some of the primary sources Hall and Thomas used, I noticed that where the two historians usually referred to beliefs about lightning, the sources spoke of thunder. I asked what that inconsistency meant and decided to look some more.1 |
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I found more odd substitutions of the same sort that piqued my interest in the history of sound: A nineteenth-century pamphlet on thunderstorms in seventeenth-century New England changed thunder to lightning. The antiquarian Sidney Perley noted in his 1891 book about storms in colonial New England that "it was generally supposed that thunder and not lightning caused the damage," though he gave no explanation for the supposition or why it changed. With the exception of attention to "oral culture," which, as we shall see, is not historically well-grounded, after Perley's observations this older audible world slipped from historical consciousness.2 |
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One problem that came up immediately when I set out to write sonic history was the belief that, unlike a document, sound is ephemeral, going out of existence even as it happens. Three factors mitigate this objection. The first is that this comparison is misleading, if not mistaken. Historians do not usually write the history of documents (discounting for the moment the important work on the history of the book as material culture); they interpret the past, all of which has gone out of existence as soon as it came into being, just like its sounds. And like any other experiences, sound and hearing can be partially recovered and interpreted from documents and material culture. |
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Second, sound is not as ephemeral as we might first think. Thunder presumably sounds much the same today as it did three or four centuries ago. Bells toll for the most part the same notes (where they have not been muffled or replaced with amplified recordings). Acoustic spaces designed to reverberate a particular way centuries ago still do so today. Or take, for example, the Puritan John Gyles's description of the sound of turtles copulating as like the sound of "a Woman washing her Linnen with a batting staff" heard from half a mile away.3 Presumably the turtles still make the same sounds. Gyles wrote for an audience that he assumed knew the sound of batting staffs on laundry, a sound no longer common in the twenty-first century. The turtles let us listen in not only on their amorous adventures, but on a sound culled from seventeenth-century everyday life, one that would normally mark the hearer as being within half a mile or so of a familiar community. |
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The problem of ephemerality is often used to discount oral histories, with historians likening the degradation of knowledge transmitted orally to the children's game of telephone where a message is written down and then whispered from one person to the next, with the result of successive transmissions often differing greatly from the input. The analogy is flawed, however, in that it likens the privacy of reading silently to oneself to the reliance on community in the preservation of oral histories. Knowledge transmission in Native American oral cultures took place, not in an individualistic way, but communally. At eighteenth-century treaty negotiations, the Iroquois assigned each article proposed by the whites to a particular sachem and his people. When the whites had finished speaking, the Indian whom the Iroquois assigned as "orator" would repeat the speech, prompted at the right moments by the sachems responsible for particular points. When framing their own proposals, the Iroquois would give a stick corresponding to each point to a particular sachem. As the orator spoke, he would be prompted by the appropriate sachems. Each sachem, in turn, relied on all of the people under him to get his part right. The process had a built-in accountability and redundancy that made it robust through time.4 |
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