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The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War * Mark M. Smith * New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 * xii, 198 pp. * $27.95
In their wartime letters and diaries, most Civil War soldiers wrote relatively little about the actual fighting. Typically incapable of finding the right words to adequately describe overwhelming sights, sounds, and smells, even those who made the attempt routinely retreated into old clichés, or else gave up entirely. More recently, practitioners of the burgeoning subfield of sensory history have grappled with the comparable dilemma of how to bring the past's five senses to the modern page. In this slim volume Mark M. Smith, who more than any other scholar brought sensory history into the study of the American South, takes on the seemingly exponential task of explaining what the soldiers and civilians of the 1860s usually could not: how the Civil War looked, sounded, tasted,...