Listening to Nineteenth-Century America.

By Mark M. Smith. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. xii, 372. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4982-0; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2657-X.)

In this fascinating study Mark M. Smith analyzes how sound and the heard word contributed to the formation of sectional identities during the antebellum period; how the Civil War and Reconstruction changed the nation's listening habits; and how postbellum Americans reinterpreted the country's soundscapes. While the author does discuss the actual sounds of nineteenth- century America, he is much more interested in how Americans--whether northern or southern, white or African American, free or slave, elite or middling or poor, male or female--interpreted the sounds around them.

Most historians of the nineteenth century privilege the world of sight and vision both in their choice of source material and in their analysis of those sources. Smith shows the limits of such an approach. He teaches us how meaningful sound was to the people of the nineteenth century and how useful an awareness of the heard world can be for historians seeking to understand the past in a more fully textured way.

During the colonial period, the soundscapes of the North and the South were similar. Although the sounds of nature differed from one locality to another, there was no significant acoustic separation between one section and the other. Urban development was relatively even in both sections, industrialization was not yet a significant factor of the northern economy, and both slavery and wage labor existed throughout the colonies.

By the antebellum period, developing industrialism and urbanization changed the soundscape of the North. Modernity and progress hummed along, signaling the economic success of capitalism. Meanwhile, slavery expanded in the South, creating its own soundscape. Southern elites believed that agriculture sustained by an enslaved population would bring about a soundscape of serenity and quietude. When they listened to the roar of industry and democracy in the North, they heard the chaos of the mob and the obliteration of tranquillity. When northerners listened to the sounds of the South, they heard the snap of the punishing whip, the screams of slaves, and the silence of domination. In short, the interpretation of regional soundscapes reflected the bitter sectional debate about the appropriate social and economic development of the nation. "Aural sectionalism" (p. 15) brought about an intensity of emotion that encouraged and perhaps sped the secession of the southern states.

The Civil War disturbed the quietude of the South. Completely aside from forcing the end of slavery, the Union won an "aural victory" (p. 17) because war created new sounds. Troops marched throughout the South. Cannons thundered and battles roared, their noise enhanced by the technological advances of the period. The injured cried or groaned in pain. The sound of serenity valued by southern elites was no more.

The postbellum South rang with the sounds of freedom. Immediately after emancipation, ex-slaves celebrated with shouts of joy and songs of jubilation. They enjoyed freedom from plantation work bells. Within a few years, however, elite whites began to exert new control over noise. They passed legislation to control the sounds of the laboring classes and also used extralegal methods. The "militaristic use of sound" (p. 244) by the Ku Klux Klan was one way the elite white South regained control after the Civil War.

Elites in the postbellum North also attempted to gain control of the noise of the working class. Labor unrest during and after the Civil War frightened the captains of industry. They feared unrestrained democracy and the workers' critique of capitalism. Northern elites looked to the New South, "where labor supposedly worked rather than rioted, and where the early strains of industrialism offered a comforting soundscape free of the noise of class discord" (p. 252).

In the end, Smith's innovative study offers historians a multitude of new metaphors, but it does not change the traditional interpretation of the nineteenth century. Instead, listening to the period underscores the importance of slavery in the development of sectionalism and in the coming of the Civil War. Smith calls for historians to consider the meaning of other senses (and perhaps the absence of particular senses) in future historical studies.

HANNAH JOYNER

Takoma Park, Maryland