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Author: Mark Michael Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199759987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Historical accounts of major events have almost always relied upon what those who were there witnessed. Nowhere is this truer than in the nerve-shattering chaos of warfare, where sight seems to confer objective truth and acts as the basis of reconstruction. In The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege, historian Mark M. Smith considers how all five senses, including sight, shaped the experience of the Civil War and thus its memory, exploring its full sensory impact on everyone from the soldiers on the field to the civilians waiting at home. From the eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter; to the stench produced by the corpses lying in the mid-summer sun at Gettysburg; to the siege of Vicksburg, once a center of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into submission, Smith recreates how Civil War was felt and lived. Relying on first-hand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for each event, offering a wholly new perspective. At Bull Run, the similarities between the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms created concern over what later would be called friendly fire and helped decide the outcome of the first major battle, simply because no one was quite sure they could believe their eyes. He evokes what it might have felt like to be in the HL Hunley submarine, in which eight men worked cheek by jowl in near-total darkness in a space 48 inches high, 42 inches wide. Often argued to be the first total war, the Civil War overwhelmed the senses because of its unprecedented nature and scope, rendering sight less reliable and, Smith shows, forcefully engaging the nonvisual senses. Sherman's March was little less than a full-blown assault on Southern sense and sensibility, leaving nothing untouched and no one unaffected. Unique, compelling, and fascinating, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege, offers readers way to experience the Civil War with fresh eyes.
Author: Mark Michael Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199759987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book
Book Description
Historical accounts of major events have almost always relied upon what those who were there witnessed. Nowhere is this truer than in the nerve-shattering chaos of warfare, where sight seems to confer objective truth and acts as the basis of reconstruction. In The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege, historian Mark M. Smith considers how all five senses, including sight, shaped the experience of the Civil War and thus its memory, exploring its full sensory impact on everyone from the soldiers on the field to the civilians waiting at home. From the eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter; to the stench produced by the corpses lying in the mid-summer sun at Gettysburg; to the siege of Vicksburg, once a center of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into submission, Smith recreates how Civil War was felt and lived. Relying on first-hand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for each event, offering a wholly new perspective. At Bull Run, the similarities between the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms created concern over what later would be called friendly fire and helped decide the outcome of the first major battle, simply because no one was quite sure they could believe their eyes. He evokes what it might have felt like to be in the HL Hunley submarine, in which eight men worked cheek by jowl in near-total darkness in a space 48 inches high, 42 inches wide. Often argued to be the first total war, the Civil War overwhelmed the senses because of its unprecedented nature and scope, rendering sight less reliable and, Smith shows, forcefully engaging the nonvisual senses. Sherman's March was little less than a full-blown assault on Southern sense and sensibility, leaving nothing untouched and no one unaffected. Unique, compelling, and fascinating, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege, offers readers way to experience the Civil War with fresh eyes.
Author: Mark Michael Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520254954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
"Smith's history of the sensate is destined to precipitate a revolution in our understanding of the sensibilities that underpinned the mentalities of past epochs."--David Howes, author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory "Mark M. Smith presents a far-ranging essay on the history of the senses that serves simultaneously as a good introduction to the historiography. If one feels in danger of sensory overload from this growing body of scholarship, Smith's piece is a useful preventive."--Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality "This is a masterful overview. The history of the senses has been a frontier field for a while now. Mark Smith draws together what we know, with an impressive sensory range, and encourages further work. A really exciting survey."--Peter N. Stearns, author of American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety "Who would ever have guessed that a book on the history of the senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling--could be informative, thought-provoking, and, at the same time, most entertaining? Ranging in both time and locale, Mark Smith's Sensing the Past makes even the philosophy about the senses from ancient times to now both learned and exciting. This work will draw scholars into under-recognized subjects and lay readers into a world we simply but unwisely take for granted."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South "Mark M. Smith has a good record of communicating his research to a broad constituency within and beyond the academy . . . This will be required reading for anyone addressing sensory history."--Penelope Gouk, author of Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England "This is a fine cultural history of the body, which takes Western and Eastern traditions and their texts quite seriously. Smith views a history of the senses not only from 'below' but places it squarely in the historical imagination. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers."--Sander L. Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology
Author: Mark Michael Smith
Publisher: Berg Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
No Marketing Blurb
Author: Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
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 Native Americans; 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. -- Richard Godbeer, author of Sexual Revolution in Early America
Author: Jerry Toner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474232981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
The ancient world used the senses to express an enormous range of cultural meanings. Indeed the senses were functionally significant in all aspects of ancient life, often in ways that were complex and interconnected. Antiquity was also a period where the senses were experienced vividly: cities stank, statues were brightly painted and literature made full use of sensory imagery to create its effects. In a steeply hierarchical world, with vast differences between the landed wealthy, the poor and the slaves, the senses played a key role in establishing and maintaining boundaries between social groups; but the use of the senses in the ancient world was not static. New religions, such as Christianity, developed their own way of using the senses, acquiring unique forms of sensory-related symbolism in processes which were slow and often contested. The aim of this volume is to provide an overview of these structures and developments and to show how their study can yield a more nuanced understanding of the ancient world. A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.
Author: Susan-Mary Grant
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700614257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In most studies of nationalism, the United States is curiously ignored or is examined only during its colonial and republican periods. But it was the Civil War, argues Susan-Mary Grant, that truly formed the American nation by unifying the states once and for all, abolishing slavery, and setting the country on the path to modernity. In light of this, says Grant, the antebellum period was the crucial phase of American national construction. In North Over South, Grant offers an original and controversial interpretation of a much discussed but poorly understood period of American history. Despite the attention generally given to Southern nationalism, Grant focuses on what Northerners thought about the South and how their beliefs created a distinct outlook: a Northern nationalism based on opposition to things Southern. Grant identifies Northern views of the South between 1830 and 1856 and examines how they developed, how they changed, and how they were used by the Republican Party in its first national election campaign. She demonstrates that the Republicans employed negative images of the South to transform Northern regionalism into a self-styled "American nationalism"-at the same time transforming the South into a region antithetical to the nation. In support of this thesis, Grant examines attitudes toward the South expressed by writers, travelers, and politicians. Focusing on works of such prominent writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and Horace Mann, she shows that the North used the South as a negative point of reference against which to define its own-hence American-identity, effectively excluding the South from full participation in the process of American national construction. This provocative study links the process of national construction in America with recent studies of European nationalism and fills a gap in the historiography of North-South relations. One of the first scholars to relate new theories of national construction to America, Grant shows that the United States has more in common with the European experience than is often acknowledged and offers a unique and illuminating perspective on the process of American nation-building. Her book will be required reading for anyone interested in antebellum America and the origins of the Civil War.
Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199726582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 946
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Book Description
Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War--the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry--and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory. The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war--slavery--and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict. This authoritative volume makes sense of that vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, a war that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty.
Author: Mark M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 55
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Book Description
A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses. Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a historical formation, Mark M. Smith traces the origins of historical work on the senses long before the emergence of the field now called “sensory history,” interrogating, exploring, and in some cases recovering pioneering work on the topic. Smith argues that we are at an important moment in the writing of the history of the senses, and he explains the potential that this field holds for the study of history generally. In addition to highlighting the strengths of current work in sensory history, Smith also identifies some of its shortcomings. If sensory history provides historians of all persuasions, times, and places a useful and incisive way to write about the past, it also challenges current practitioners to think more carefully about the historicity of the senses and the desirability—even the urgency—of engaged and sustained debate among themselves. In this way, A Sensory History Manifesto invites scholars to think about how their field needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of sensory history are to be realized. Concise and convincing, A Sensory History Manifesto is a must-read for historians of all specializations.
Author: D. Peter MacLeod
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101946954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
A huge, ambitious re-creation of the eighteenth-century Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the pivotal battle in the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) to win control of the trans-Appalachian region of North America, a battle consisting of the British and American colonists on one side and the French and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other, and leading directly to the colonial War of Independence and the creation of Canada. It took five years of warfare fought on three continents—Europe, Asia, and North America—to bring the forces arrayed against one another—Britain, Prussia, and Hanover against France, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, Russia, and Spain (Churchill called it “the first world war”)—to the plateau outside Quebec City, on September 13, 1759, on fields owned a century before by a fisherman named Abraham Martin . . . It was the final battle of a three-month siege by the British Army and Navy of Quebec, the walled city that controlled access to the St. Lawrence River and the continent’s entire network of waterways; a battle with the British utilizing 15,000 soldiers, employing 186 ships, with hundreds of colonists aboard British warships and transports from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with France sending in a mere 400 reinforcements in addition to its 3,500 soldiers. The battle on the Plains of Abraham lasted twenty minutes, and at its finish the course of a continent was changed forever . . . New military tactics were used for the first time against standard European formations . . . Generals Wolfe and Montcalm each died of gunshot wounds . . . France surrendered Quebec to the British, setting the course for the future of Canada, paving the way for the signing of the Treaty of Paris that gave the British control of North America east of the Mississippi, and forcing France to relinquish its claims on New Orleans and to give the lands west of the Mississippi to Spain for surrendering Florida to the British. After the decisive battle, Britain’s maritime and colonial supremacy was assured, its hold on the thirteen American colonies tightened. The American participation in ousting the French as a North American power spurred the confidence of the people of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, who began to agitate for independence from Great Britain. Sixteen years later, France, still bitter over the loss of most of its colonial empire, intervened on behalf of the patriots in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). In Northern Armageddon, Peter MacLeod, using original research—diaries, journals, letters, and firsthand accounts—and bringing to bear all of his extensive knowledge and grasp of warfare and colonial North American history, tells the epic story on a human scale. He writes of the British at Quebec through the eyes of a master’s mate on one of the ships embroiled in the battle. And from the French perspective, as the British bombarded Quebec, of four residents of the city—a priest, a clerk, a nun, and a notary—caught in the crossfire. MacLeod gives us as well the large-scale ramifications of this clash of armies, not only on the shape of North America, but on the history of Europe itself. A stunning work of military history.
Author: Andrew J. Rotter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190924713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
When encountering unfamiliar environments in India and the Philippines, the British and the Americans wrote extensively about the first taste of mango and meat spiced with cumin, the smell of excrement and coconut oil, the feel of humidity and rough cloth against skin, the sound of bells and insects, and the appearance of dark-skinned natives and lepers. So too did the colonial subjects they encountered perceive the agents of empire through their senses and their skins. Empire of course involved economics, geopolitics, violence, a desire for order and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also involved an encounter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interaction, political negotiation, policing, schooling, and healing. While these all concerned what people thought about each other, perceptions of others, as Andrew Rotter shows, were also formed through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In this book, Rotter offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end (1857-1947) and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence (1898-1946). The British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to properly prioritize the senses and to ensure them against offense or affront. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were unfit for self-government. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced Anglo-Americans to educate them before formally withdrawing their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization and to some extent resisted imperial efforts to impose their own versions. What eventually emerged were compromises between these nations' sensory regimes. A fascinating and original comparative work, Empires of the Senses offers new perspectives on imperial history.
