Listening to history

NEXT MONTH, 26 sturdy men and women will cast aside modern conveniences and take up residence in a bare-bones settlement on an isolated stretch of the Maine coast. Their challenge? To feed and provide for themselves in the harsh environment of northern New England, under the watchful eyes of a TV crew.

Welcome to "Colonial House," PBS's latest exercise in "experiential history." With an exacting attention to detail, the show's producers have recreated the textures and tastes, sights and smells, of a New England village circa 1628: the pungent odors of free-roving farm animals, the peal of bells, the acrid taste of hand-brewed beer, the rough textures of homespun garments.

"Colonial House" isn't the first historical undertaking to use the sights and sounds of the past to teach us about it. But until recently, these practices have been relegated to the realm of popular history as presented at places like Colonial Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation. Now, however, two scholars are asserting the importance of sensory experience in American history, pricking up their ears, if not opening their nostrils, to what sensual experience can tell us about the deeper meanings of the past.

"The report of the senses was of immense importance to the people who lived in early America. It should be so to historians," writes Peter Charles Hoffer in his recent book "Sensory Worlds in Early America" (Johns Hopkins). Hoffer, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, considers his work a corrective to the omissions of social history. We know a great deal about how ordinary people in the past dressed, what they ate, and where they lived, he argues. Why not what they saw, heard, and tasted -- and how they understood and acted on such sensations?

Historian Richard Cullen Rath of the University of Hawaii at Manoa agrees. In his new book "How Early America Sounded" (Cornell), Rath tunes his ears to religious ranting, the roar of waterfalls, the boom of thunder, and other features of the colonial American soundscape. "Understanding the sensory world is intrinsically important if you want to understand how people were in the past, which is what history is all about," he says.

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Sensory history is not entirely new. Sixty years ago the French historian Lucien Febvre called for a new history of the senses that would provide a window into the mindset of the past. More recently, another French historian, Alain Corbin, has continued Febvre's project in such works as "The Foul and the Fragrant," a study of "odor and the French social imagination," and "Village Bells," a history of the role of church bells in struggles between civil and religious authority following the French Revolution.

Colonial America offers a number of attractions to the sensory historian. As Rath points out, the 17th century was both a quieter and a more aurally powerful time. Sounds -- whether bells, thunder, or the strange cries of unfamiliar peoples -- had a far more potent effect on their listeners, including even the alleged power to kill. Indeed, Hoffer argues that some historians of early America, such as Yale's John Demos, in his pioneering 1994 work "The Unredeemed Captive," and Harvard's Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose 1990 book "A Midwife's Tale" recreated the daily life of a rural 18th-century midwife, have been doing a kind of sensory history all along, but "they just weren't calling it that."

Still, sensory historians are faced with a steep historiographical challenge: How do you recover evidence of sounds and smells from written documents and other remnants of the past? Even Corbin, something of a virtuoso of his craft, has confessed to the difficulties confronting the would-be historian of the senses: "Like the hunter crouched in the mud, searching for the trace of some invisible game," he wrote in a 1995 essay, "he has to deduce the behavior of the other from minute and subtle indicators."

Both Hoffer and Rath have mined the diaries of the colonial period for subtle traces of sensory impressions -- and have found a rich, full record of the senses. Pointing to the ingenuity of historical reenactments and the curators of living museums like Plimoth Plantation, Hoffer writes that the sensate past is eminently recoverable. In the course of his research, Hoffer traveled to many historical sites, sketchbook and camera in hand, and used the insights of social psychology and geography to tease out sensory impressions from historical documents. (At one point, standing in a field in Danvers, the site of many alleged bewitchings at the time of the Salem witch trials, Hoffer was temporarily convinced that a barking dog and the rustling of leaves were aural signs of Satan's presence.)

In his effort to deduce the early American soundscape, Rath draws on everything from 17th-century sheet music to the architectural plans of New England churches to the measurements of old bells. But the real challenge is understanding how pealing bells and other sensory events were experienced by people at the time. The past is a foreign county -- they heard things differently there. Sounds had an immediate power: They were tangible forces "laden with intent," Rath argues.

Consider the case of thunder, which for much of the 17th century, Rath shows, was endowed with terrible, even lethal power by the Puritans. In 1666, for example, the citizens of Marshfield endured a violent storm in which three people were killed when "an astonishing thunderclap fell upon the house," as one witness put it. But storms were also seen as the mighty roar of the Almighty himself, whose voice could be heard as thunder boomed.

Man-made sounds were also important features of the soundscape, and were often used to enforce social order. In 1685, for example, Newton required that its residents live within earshot of the town bell.

Nonverbal human utterance, too, carried great force. The Puritans obsessively tried to regulate such utterances, clashing with Quakers, whose howls and roars they disdained, over the proper sound for a person of God to emit. Within their own community, even too much quiet murmuring was considered unhealthy, a harbinger of social anarchy. Struggling to make sense of violent clashes between settlers and Indians in the 1670s, which left many New England settlements devastated, the Puritan clergyman Increase Mather fretted that the troubles were brought on because the settlers were "full of murmuring and unreasonable Rage against the enemy." Such murmurs were indications of an unsettled, vulnerable people, and possibly even signs of Satan himself.

Rath argues that sound became diminished in importance after 1690 through a confluence of trends, including the advent of a mass print culture that affected even the illiterate, guided the eye, and disrupted older ways of listening. (Rath says he plans to develop this argument about the "disenchantment of America" more fully in a companion volume.) By 1790, once fearsome sounds were perceived as "little more than a harmless whiff of disturbed air." Using diaries and other printed sources, Rath tracks the diminution of the force of sound; as citations of lightning and other visual phenomenon increase, references to thunder decrease. Increase Mather, for example, struggled to incorporate new scientific theories about thunder and lightning into the older understandings of thunder's destructive powers.

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In "Sensory Worlds in Early America," Peter Hoffer moves beyond sound to forge a more integrated understanding of the historical role of all five senses. Writes Hoffer, "There are times when the sensory experience is so highly charged . . . that it motivates people to act in ways they would have not acted otherwise."

Take, for example, the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, which Hoffer explores in a key chapter of his book. Still the subject of contentious debate, it has been interpreted variously as a bout of mass hysteria, a misogynistic campaign against propertied women, or the culmination of political tensions within Salem. But Hoffer argues that we misunderstand what happened at Salem if we don't take it as a fundamentally sensory event.

The Puritans were a deeply apprehensive people, using their eyes and ears to discern an invisible but "vivid and potent paranormal world" of spirits and ghosts, demons and angels, he claims. If the evidence of those who testified in the trials was to be believed, the invisible world had turned against them and invaded the perceptible world: Witchcraft, in Hoffer's formulation, was a "crime against the senses," taking ordinary people and things and transforming them into malevolent threats.

In the view of elite ministers, nothing less than "sensory anarchy" had descended on Salem: alleged witches were sentenced to death based on accounts of ghostly forms, visible only to the accuser, acting on the observable physical world. After such "spectral evidence" was banned from the proceedings in 1693, there was a drastic increase in acquittals.

Like Rath, Hoffer sees a shift in the American "sensorium" at the turn of the century. But instead of a simple shift away from the aural to the visual Hoffer sees a continuing struggle. For Hoffer, the witchcraft crisis was nothing less than a battle between elites and commoners for control of the sensorium, and what sensory experience revealed about the true nature of the world.

After Salem, Hoffer contends, the paranormal and its sensory manifestations were consigned to the fringe. During the Great Awakening, the religious revival that swept through New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies in the 1740s, the visible and audible expressions of the sinning and the saved posed a threat to more ordered expressions of Christianity and were ultimately pushed to "the periphery of the colonial sensory field."

A similar struggle unfolded in the political realm. The mob violence of the 1760s and `70s, in Hoffer's view, was a kind of "sensory warfare" as mobs used "the tactics of visible and auditory terrorism" to strike at symbols of British rule. In 1765, for example, a mob ransacked the elegant Boston townhouse of colonial official Thomas Hutchinson. As Hoffer points out, they did not burn it but painstakingly ripped it apart by hand, in order to deliver a more potent "sensory message."

Yet after the Revolution, America's leaders denied a place for taste and touch, sound and sight, in one of its most precious documents. Ironically, Hoffer argues, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the sanctity of human freedoms but disenfranchised the senses. Looking back, the founders were troubled by the righteous anger of the mobs and created a language to redirect the energies of the young republic to more genteel and rational ends. "By turning to natural rights philosophy to justify rebellion," Hoffer writes, "the revolutionaries abjured the world of the senses in favor of logic and law."

If we are to take Hoffer's claims seriously, then the highest goal of historians may indeed be to help America recover its senses.

Matthew Price lives in Brooklyn and is a regular contributor to the Globe.