| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. By Mark M. Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii, 372 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2657-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4982-0.)

Mark M. Smith's latest work is a fascinating attempt to explore the ways in which "hearing" how the past sounded enriches our understanding. Whenever newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, or political speeches mentioned noise or used sound as a metaphor, Smith finds material for his argument. Smith argues that the plantation world of the antebellum South and the industrializing world of the market-driven North sounded different from each other. Perhaps more important, contemporaries wrote about them as if they sounded different. On the other hand, elites of each section certainly conceived that the disciplined sound of order was better than raucous lower-class noises. Would-be southern "maestros" loved the sounds of labor and of plantation bells but feared both democratic uproar and slave silence. The latter made uneasy whites imagine the hidden speech of conspiracy. Northern bourgeois, meanwhile, loved the ordered hum of the factory, although intellectual dissenters such as Henry David Thoreau preferred a return to the less regimented murmurs of insects, birds, and water in the woods. . . .

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