Listening to nineteenth-century America / Mark M. Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Mark M. (Mark Michael), 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

North and south.

History.

Sectionalism (United States).

Elite (Social sciences).

Silence.

Social aspects.

Sound.

Noise--Social aspects.

Noise.

United States--Social life and customs--19th century.

United States.

Manners and customs.

United States--Social conditions--19th century.

Social conditions.

United States--History--1815-1861.

Noise--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Sound--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Silence--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Elite (Social sciences)--Southern States--History--19th century.

Elite (Social sciences)--Northeastern States--History--19th century.

Sectionalism (United States)--History--19th century.

North and south--History--19th century.

Northeastern States.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

x, 372 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2001]

Summary:

Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free -- to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War -- we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard.

Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.

Contents:

Introduction: Sounding Pasts 1

Part I. Imagining Maestros: Constructing and Defending the Southern Soundscape 19

Chapter 1. Soniferous Gardens 23

Chapter 2. Creeping Discord 47

Chapter 3. Dreadful, Silent Moments 67

Part II. Keynotes Old and New: Listening to Northern Soundscapes 93

Chapter 4. Northern Echoes 95

Chapter 5. Sounds Modern 119

Part III. Aural Sectionalism: The Politics of Hearing and the Hearing of Politics 147

Chapter 6. Listening to Bondage 150

Chapter 7. Northern Shouts and Southern Ears 172

Part IV. Noises Hideous, Silences Profound, Sounds Ironic: Listening to the Civil War and Reconstruction 195

Chapter 8. Noises of War 198

Chapter 9. Confederate Soundscapes 219

Chapter 10. Sounds of Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Reunion 238

Sound Matters: An Essay on Method 261.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [323]-355) and index.

ISBN:

080782657X

0807849820

OCLC:

46671121