Listening to Nineteenth-Century America

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, industrializati...