Over the past half-century, historians have greatly enriched our
understanding of America's past, broadening their fields of inquiry
from such traditional topics as politics and war to include the
agency of class, race, ethnicity, and gender and to focus on the
lives of ordinary men and women. We now know that homes and
workplaces form a part of our history as important as battlefields
and the corridors of power. Only recently, however, have historians
begun to examine the fundamentals of lived experience and how
people perceive the world through the five senses.
In this ambitious work, Peter Charles Hoffer presents a "sensory
history" of early North America, offering a bold new understanding
of the role that sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch played in
shaping the lives of Europeans, Indians, and Africans in the New
World. Reconstructing the most ephemeral aspects of America's
colonial past -- the choking stench of black powder, the cacophony
of unfamiliar languages, the taste of fresh water and new foods,
the first sight of strange peoples and foreign landscapes, the
rough texture of homespun, the clumsy weight of a hoe -- Hoffer
explores the impact of sensuous experiences on human thought and
action. He traces the effect sensation and perception had on the
cause and course of events conventionally attributed to deeper
cultural and material circumstances.
Hoffer revisits select key events, encounters, and writings from
America's colonial past to uncover the sensory elements in each and
decipher the ways in which sensual data were mediated by prevailing
and often conflicting cultural norms. Among the episodes he
reexamines are the first meetings of Europeans and NativeAmericans;
belief in and encounters with the supernatural; the experience of
slavery and slave revolts; the physical and emotional fervor of the
Great Awakening; and the feelings that prompted the Revolution.
Imaginatively conceived, deeply informed, and elegantly written,
Sensory Worlds of Early America convincingly establishes sensory
experience as a legitimate object of historical inquiry and vividly
brings America's colonial era to life.
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