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Still Coming to "Our" Senses:
An Introduction
Mark M. Smith
| It took a historian of visual culture to issue a call for a fully expanded sensory treatment of United States history. Almost fifteen years ago, in the pages of the Journal of American History, the late George H. Roeder Jr. claimed that "ours is a nearly sense-less profession." Roeder's arresting complaint was based on a detailed search for "analytically significant smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and tactile sensations" associated with twentieth-century U.S. history in sixteen textbooks written over the previous forty years. His findings were mixed. Few textbook authors, maintained Roeder, paid much "attention to sensory dimensions of history," and when they did, most of their attention was on visual culture or foul smells, pain, and noises, which they used, not to examine how people experienced the past, but to spice their narratives.1 |
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Roeder offered several explanations for this sensory poverty. At one level, he thought the heavy emphasis on photographic and visual evidence deterred authors—and readers—from exploring "the sensuous qualities of visual encounters." More fundamentally, Roeder argued that "we as historians have dissed sensory experience for some of the same reasons that throughout much of this century genteel Americans have classified 'garlic breath' as a social offense and use of deodorant as a social necessity." Roeder was not being tendentious. Although he believed that historians were prone to reinscribe "prevailing power relations" by appealing only to strong sensations, such a tendency "does not mean that most historians treated the sensory dimensions of history as they did because they thought this would help protect the existing social order." Rather, historians writing before 1970, "wrote and taught as they did because sensory experience did not seem particularly pertinent to the study of political, economic, diplomatic, military, and intellectual history, as traditionally defined." Social historians, however, had begun to include the senses "because sensory experience did seem pertinent to the study of such newly emphasized fields as African-American, women's, and environmental history."2 |
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The essays presented in this round table suggest that while social historians have begun to elaborate thoughtfully, imaginatively, and meaningfully on what their colleagues in the 1970s started (I refer most obviously to the essays by Connie Y. Chiang on smell and Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick on taste), historians with other interests have begun to take the senses equally seriously. As the essays by Richard Cullen Rath, James W. Cook, and me suggest, the senses have become relevant to intellectual historians and scholars of religion, politics, and economic systems. While the essays offered in this round table do not suggest that sensory history—perhaps best understood as occupying a middle ground between a field and methodology—has colonized all fields of historical inquiry, they do begin to live up to Roeder's concluding brief: "When we write about the senses with the same fullness and precision that we demand of ourselves when discussing politics, philosophy, or social movements, we enlarge our audience, our field of study, and our understanding of the past."3 |
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