How Early America Sounded by Richard Cullen Rath

From the Publisher

"My hope is that by attending to sound I have been able to open up parts of these worlds, not to get a glimpse of them but to listen in. These were worlds much more alive with sound than our own, worlds not yet disenchanted, worlds perhaps even chanted into being."-from the Introduction

In early America, every sound had a living, willful force at its source. Sometimes these forces were not human or even visible. In this fascinating and highly original work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath recreates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power.

From thunder and roaring waterfalls to bells and drums, natural and human-made sounds other than language were central to the lives of the inhabitants of colonial America. Rath considers the multiple soundscapes shaped by European Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans from 1600 to 1770, and particularly the methods that people used to interpret and express their beliefs about sound. In the process he shows how sound shaped identities, bonded communities, and underscored-or undermined-the power of authorities.

This book's stunning evidence of the importance of sound in early America-even among the highly literate New England Puritans-reminds us of a time before a world dominated by the visual, a young country where hearing was a more crucial part of living.

Author Bio:Richard Cullen Rath is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Library Journal

A former musical band member, Rath (history, Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa) challenges us to imagine a premodern world where information was more often derived from, and power attributed to, sound rather than sight. This soundscape was Colonial North America from 1607 to1770. Using the rich collections available at the American Antiquarian Society, the Connecticut and Massachusetts Historical Societies, and the John Carter Brown Library, Rath offers much literary and anthropological evidence to prove his case that the past placed greater importance on the aural than the visual; at the time, even silent reading was unusual. In the well-organized chapters, the author acknowledges that, while others have recently emphasized the significance of "orality," historians have largely neglected the roles played by non-verbal noises. Among these were thunder (then deemed more deadly than lightning); waterfalls; wind; handbells, announcements by town criers, ceremonial drums and trumpets, and similar community-building sounds; and disturbances to the elitist "sonic order" presented by dissident religious "ranting" and humming. Through creolization, a cultural mixing whose linguistic equivalent was pidginization, African American slaves and American Indians were able to modify their instrumentality to achieve autonomous cultural spaces. Illustrated with graphs, drawings, and photographs of church halls and amply annotated, this tour de force of original scholarship is suitable for all library collections. Indeed, its arguments merit recurrent reading.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents