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, industriali…