Honorable Mention, History Category, Professional and Scholarly
Publishing Awards, Association of American Publishers
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.
