| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Charles Hoffer. Sensory Worlds in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 334. $39.95.
Scholars who point to the visual bias in historical work are sometimes challenged by those who believe that they already "do" sensory history. But, as Hoffer's thoughtful new book shows, playful reference to, say, olfaction does not a sensory history make. Part of the contribution of Peter Charles Hoffer's elegantly written study is that it suggests what dedicated attention to the senses might achieve.	1
Ambitiously, Hoffer aims to show that "sensation and perception affected some of those great events whose cause and course we historians conventionally attribute to deep cultural structures and overarching material forces" (p. viii). He examines several episodes, beginning with a consideration of how sight and sound shaped early encounters between Native Americans and the English. Hoffer makes good points here, offering thoughtful observations on how "the two peoples employed their senses in such profoundly different ways" (p. 24), with color and sound as points of contest. He then examines the Salem witchcraft trials to illustrate a "series of sensory crises" that led New Englanders to "rethink the meaning of evidences of the invisible world" (p. 79). Mid-eighteenth-century slave revolts at Stono, South Carolina, and in New York City constitute another episode. Again, sight plays a dominant role in Hoffer's analysis, but to good effect. He writes convincingly on the visual importance of arson and offers thoughtful remarks on the role of staring in the Stono rebellion.	. . .

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