| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark M. Smith. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. Pp. x, 372. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

Historians habitually invoke the sights and sounds of particular eras but until recently have left the latter largely unstudied. Mark M. Smith not only adds to an emergent historical phenomenology of sound (and silence) but significantly advances the field by synthesizing and clarifying its conceptual and methodological lexicon. This he deftly employs to reconstruct the sonic dimensions of North/South sectional politics in antebellum, wartime, and reconstruction America. Smith is not out to displace existing accounts of the coming of the Civil War; rather he seeks to demonstrate how aural representations of sectional otherness heightened confrontational tensions between the elites of North and South and increased the ultimate ferocity of the divide. 1

Smith's book recreates the increasingly polarized sectional soundscapes and their simultaneous representation as both idealized and invidious. What southern elites registered fondly as the harmonious quietude of the plantation was, to northern ears, the silent tyranny of servitude intolerably disfigured by the hellish disquiet of the slave market, the screams of the beaten, the clank of their chains. What northerners celebrated as the robust and welcome sounds of modern productivity and free labor—the hum of industry and the eager voices of democracy—southerners deplored as the invasive tumult of the city, the factory, and the mob. The metaphors of aural imagery became more real than their referents, sharpening discourse into polemic. . . .

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