| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

How Early America Sounded. By Richard Cullen Rath. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii, 227 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8014-4126-9.)
Richard Cullen Rath presents a colonial study that is stimulating and frustrating. Recent centuries offer enormous evidence; colonial records offer less, mostly writings. Are inferences drawn solely from written records convincing? Rath believes no, contending other evidence merits consideration. Thus he studies colonials' "soundways" (p. 2). This is intriguing. Pitfalls abound, an obvious one involving his attempt to translate a "sensory world as it was before it needed to be translated" (ibid.).	1
Rath employs both imaginative and obvious examples to enliven the colonial "sound-scape" (ibid.). Varying perceptions of thunder reveal details about pre-Enlightenment beliefs. Music enters Rath's discussions, with descriptions, for example, of African percussions serving slaves with coded messages that made masters fearful. Rath casts Puritans and Quakers, intensely concerned with the contents of worship, constructing means to highlight important sounds and minimize distractions. As the gravelly nature of modern blues vocalists strengthens their appeal, Rath describes "para-linguistic" aspects of colonial speech, noting tone and volume in "civil" discourse and "groans and roars" among the "uncivil" (p. 120).	. . .

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