| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sensory Worlds in Early America. By Peter Charles Hoffer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. x, 334 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-7353-3.)

Every once in a while one encounters a book whose author frustrates the reader by attempting too much, and Peter Charles Hoffer's new book appears to be a case in point. Hoffer sets out

to discover how the world presented itself to people in the past and then ask what impact the reports of the senses, mediated to be sure by cultural norms, had upon human action and thought. (p. viii)

Over the years that he has spent researching this project, Hoffer has reached the conclusion 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" (ibid.). To write about and analyze experiences that cannot be reduced to words is extremely difficult, but this ambitious book, despite its flaws and perhaps even because of the author's willingness to go out onto many new limbs, encourages us to think about familiar subjects in new and illuminating ways. Sensory Worlds in Early America is just such a book.

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