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How Early America Sounded * Richard Cullen Rath * Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003 * xii, 227 pp. * $32.50
Richard Cullen Rath begins his book with an arresting assertion: "Sound was more important to early Americans than it is to you" (p. ix). Developing this claim over the course of his study, Rath joins a growing number of scholars of what has come to be known as "auditory culture." American and European historians as well as musicologists, sociologists, and scholars of literature and media studies interested in this direction in cultural history have been quietly, or not so quietly, producing a body of scholarship over the last several years notable for its interdisciplinary approach to making sense of sound. Their work attempts to recover or analyze the acoustics and soundscapes of the past, investigate when and how sounds acquired significance, and consider the historical role of close listening, in books ranging from Bruce R. Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) to Alain Corbin's Village Bells (1998) to Mark M. Smith's Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001) (How Early America Sounded has clear affinities with all three), and on to this reviewer's own Victorian Soundscapes (2003) and Emily Ann Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002).
In a series of chapters covering the period from 1607 to...