Imagine writing on a topic you know well but relying on a method that has yet to bear a widely accepted name to write it. I found myself in precisely this position in the late 1990s when I first started delving into what was sometimes called “histories of the senses” and gradually came to be known as “sensory history.” When I published Listening to Nineteenth-Century America in 2001, methodological and historiographical guideposts were few and far between.[1]
At the time, relatively little had been written on listening and sound in U.S. history and I had to turn to colleagues in European history and adjacent disciplinary fields for guidance. Alain Corbin, Peter Bailey, James H. Johnson, and Bruce R. Smith, among others, were all Europeanists who had already written about the senses and I found their work essential to my thinking about nineteenth-century America.[2] R. Murray Schafer’s influential body of work on sound theory and soundscapes proved invaluable as I sifted through voluminous empirical evidence on how nineteenth-century Americans listened to one another. Although I benefited from Raymond W. Smilor’s pioneering 1977 article on sound and noise during the Progressive era and Shane and Graham White’s important 2000 article on slavery and sound, I did not have the benefit of fully fledged monographs on the topic from historians of the United States. Richard Cullen Rath’s spectacular How Early America Sounded wouldn’t be out until 2003 and Emily Thomson’s brilliant The Soundscape of Modernity was published a year after Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. But what I learned writing my book was simple and enduring: reading outside of U.S. history and embracing interdisciplinarity was essential, both practically and intellectually, for the writing of sensory history.[3]
While Listening to Nineteenth-Century America was generally well received by U.S. historians, the book raised questions that came to gnaw at sensory history: to what extent can the senses generally, the nonvisual ones especially, help explain historical causation? In other words, can the ways in which people touched, smelled, tasted, and listened explain historical change in ways as—or more—effectively than relying exclusively on histories of seeing and looking?
In an attempt to begin to answer these questions I offered readers of the Journal of American History a roundtable discussion on the history of the senses, which was published in 2008. The roundtable consisted of essays by several experts writing on various aspects of the senses. Connie Y. Chiang offered us a fascinating look at how olfaction helped shape perceptions of race; Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick unpacked the history of taste in the United States; Richard Cullen Rath treated readers to an astute exploration of why and how sounds mattered in the past; James W. Cook sensibly reminded us that the rise in sensory history should not dilute our interest in the history of visuality; and my contribution dealt with the history of hapticity and the protocols of touch in nineteenth century America. The roundtable concluded with a trenchant piece by David Howes, a pioneer in sensory anthropology, who made important claims about the relevance of interdisciplinarity for U.S. historians.[4]
Questions about sensory history that had animated my 2001 work were still extant in that roundtable, and those questions shaped my introduction to it. I pointed to the earlier and critically important work of George H. Roeder, Jr., a U.S. historian of visuality who, in 1994, made a clarion call for the inclusion of the other senses in the telling of U.S. history. I also stressed how many of the essays in the roundtable were indebted to work by non-U.S. historians. Also apparent in the essays was the work of scholars in adjacent fields, such as sound studies and cultural anthropology.[5]
It also appeared to me at that time that sensory history operated at several interpretive levels. At the most basic, and as many of the essays in the 2008 roundtable demonstrated, sensory history did not necessarily destabilize preexisting narratives of explanations of well-known events. Often, sensory history functioned to confirm what we already knew. In this sense, sensory history served to expand the texture of the past, not radically revise it. There was and remains real value to this—not least because it reminds us that people in the past touched, smelled, tasted, and listened even as they mediated experience through the eyes. If seeing was believing, so too was touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing.
I then ventured that sensory history could sometimes help explain the why and not just the how; that nonvisual senses can explain causality and developments that would remain inexplicable if we relied solely on visual evidence and what people said they saw. I also noted that for the field to flourish more fully, historians would have to attend more often to multisensory and intersensory treatments—focusing especially how the senses worked together.
The roundtable is now seventeen years old, and a lot has changed in the field. Most obviously, the sheer number of books, articles, edited collections, and book series dedicated to the sensate has ballooned. Writing my overview of the field, published as Sensory History in 2007, was a relatively straightforward endeavor simply because not much explicit sensory history had been published at the time; today, writing that overview would be immeasurably harder simply because of the sheer volume of work produced on the topic since 2007. In 2008, I became General Editor of a book series, Studies in Sensory History, published by the University of Illinois Press (which was then reconfigured in 2018 as Perspectives on Sensory History, published by Penn State University Press). Both series echoed much of what was suggested in the 2008 roundtable, publishing work on non-U.S. sensory history (Europe as well as Asia), on all of the senses, on U.S. history (including Adam Mack’s multisensory history, Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers (2015)), on interdisciplinary work (most notably David Howes’s pioneering Sensorial Investigations (2023)); and important work on multisensory and intersensory history as well as synaesthesia (including Polina Dimova’s very recent, At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor across the Arts in European Modernism (2025)).[6]
I would also suggest that sensory history has added explanative power to its repertoire. More than merely texturing what we already know, some work has made the case that relying on vision alone occludes rather than clarifies. For example, my own effort in this regard, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, which came out just before the roundtable, made the case that precisely because race became an unstable visual category during and after slavery, slaveholders and especially segregationists turned to the other senses. In shamelessly stereotypical fashion, they used smell, taste, touch, and sound in an attempt to make racial identity detectable and immutable to those who enforced the color line. In short, segregationists used the senses in an effort to anchor and fix race as a certain and unalterable quality. Vision, then, had failed to stabilize race and, in that respect, the history of southern racism is not explicable only through sight—the other senses hold explanative power too.[7]
Specific developments in any field are always hard to predict and sensory history is no exception. In 2008, it was, for example, impossible to anticipate just how much attention the sensory history of war would generate. Even now it remains uncertain how sensory history will intersect with emerging fields, such as animal studies and disability studies, although sensory work on both is being produced.[8]
Arguably, the least expected development in the field, and one I certainly did not anticipate in 2008, has been the braiding of sensory and emotions history. In 2018, the late Jan Plamper, editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series for Histories of Emotions and the Senses, approached me and well-known historian of the senses, Rob Boddice, to think about writing a book on how the senses and emotions might work in tandem. In fact, Rob and I had already discussed such a project some years beforehand and the moment seemed right to think seriously about moving our respective fields forward by braiding them together. In Emotion, Sense, Experience, published in 2020, we called on historians of emotions and the senses to open a sustained and meaningful dialogue. We argued that while there was in fact a largely unacknowledged genealogy of historical writing insisting on an intertwined history of emotions and the senses, we believed that, for the most part, historians had unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses. By actively bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation, we made the case that historians might advance a new way of understanding historical lived experience. We stressed that the project would be necessarily interdisciplinary. The book unpacked some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience and invited readers to re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical.[9]
We offered concrete examples, drawing on Bettina Hitzer’s work on the context-driven association between the sense of smell and the emotion of disgust among twentieth-century German medical professionals and cancer patients. In the 1920s and 1930s, German medical professionals treating cancer patients tied the meaning of the smell of cancer to the emotion of disgust. Physicians described the smell of cancer as offensive to not only their noses but to the noses of other patients and began to segregate cancer patients from non-terminal ones. This, notes Hitzer, occurred in the context of the politicization of smell and the rise of a totalitarian government that happily resurrected the vicious canard of the stench of the Jewish body and associations with disgust—a potent stereotype that helped lead to unimaginable horrors. After the fall of the Third Reich, Hitzer finds the connection between smell and disgust being severed. By the 1950s, it had been severed, partly to distance the country from the effects of having knitted the sense and emotion together to such appalling effect during the Second World War. Now, medical professionals were urged to mask their disgust when treating cancer patients, effectively quarantining the emotion. There had been no real changes in how cancer was treated; what had changed was the delegitimization of the moral association between the smell of cancer and the emotion of disgust. In this way, the historical experience of cancer patients is explicable only in terms of a fully contextualized and braided history of emotions and senses.[10]
Jan Plamper himself showed how such a reimaging of sensory and emotions history might look in his work on the smells, sounds, and emotions of the Russian Revolution. Here, he called for “an integrated category of experience… in which the senses are no longer considered temporally or functionally separate….” Instead, he maintained, “the senses emerge as part of an integrated, multimodal, simultaneous sensory-emotional-cognitive process; ultimately this will require a neologism that leaves behind the sensory, emotional, and cognitive as distinct dimensions and blends them into a single term.”[11]
Plamper’s work showed how such an approach might work. “The February Revolution proper,” he argued, was marked less by strikes and food shortages than by the sounds of gunshots. The rattle of machine guns constituted a sensory beginning of the Revolution. Soon, people in Petrograd came to rely “on their eyes and ears to detect whether guns were being fired at targets or discharged into the air.” They quickly learned to listen in new ways and “became very good at distinguishing blank shots from shots with live ammunition.” Gunshot sounds inspired emotional terror and panic. Plamper’s careful attention to context allowed him to trace changes in the meaning of sound and emotion in the February Revolution. It took just a few days for people to become habituated to the sounds of gunfire and for them to recalibrate new thresholds of fear. Gunshots rapidly became “fairly usual” and with that predictability the sounds no longer proved “alarming.” The experience of the February Revolution, then, cannot be disentangled from the sounds of gunfire, the emotion of fear, and change over time. Plamper’s point is that they should not be disaggregated at all because it was the very simultaneity and braiding of the senses and emotion—understood within a very specific context—that allows us to better understand the experience of the February Revolution.[12]
For all the change in the field since 2008, the salient points made in the roundtable have stood the test of time. U.S. sensory historians still—and quite properly and by necessity—read widely in non-U.S. fields to inspire and hone their work; they also remain unusually attentive to interdisciplinarity; and they are more likely than ever to think in terms of multiple senses and intersensoriality. The 2008 roundtable did good work for the field of sensory history and it is still worth reading today.
Mark Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, the Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies, and Director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is author or editor of over a dozen books and his work has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times, the London Times, Brain, Science, the Washington Post, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. He is Editor of Cambridge University Press’s series, Studies on the American South, and of the Pennsylvania State University Press’s Perspectives in Sensory History. Smith has published a dozen books on southern history and on sensory history, including the award-winning Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, Stono: A Slave Rebellion, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, How Race Is Made, Sensing the Past, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War, Smell and History, A Sensory History Manifesto, and, with Rob Boddice, Emotion, Sense, Experience. He is currently completing a book, Emporium, Imperium, Sensorium: How Listening to Nature Shaped U.S. Imperialism.
[1] Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001).
[2] Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (1998); Peter Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise,” Body and Society, 2 (June 1996), 49–66; James H. Johson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999).
[3] Raymond W. Smilor, “Cacophony at 34th and 6th: The Noise Problem in America, 1900–1930,” American Studies, 18 (1977), 23–38; Shane White and Graham White, “‘At Intervals I Was Nearly Stunned by the Noise He Made’: Listening to African American Religious Sound in the Era of Slavery,” American Nineteenth Century History, 1 (Spring 2000), 34–61; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (2003); Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (2004). The easiest way to access the works referenced here is to read my edited collection, Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (2004).
[4] “The Senses in American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 378–491; Connie Y. Chiang, “The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History,” ibid., 405–16; Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick, “In Good Taste: Rethinking American History with Our Palates,” ibid., 392–404; Richard Cullen Rath, “Hearing American History,” ibid., 417–31; James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” ibid., 432–41; David Howes, “Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses,” ibid., 442–51.
[5] George H. Roeder, Jr., “Coming to Our Senses,” Journal of American History, 81 (Dec. 1994), 1112–22. David Howes’s important work echoed in the roundtable essays. See, for example, David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (1991); and David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003).
[6] Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (2007), which was then published as Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (2008).
[7] Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (2006).
[8] On the senses and war, future work on the senses, important work on how sensory history has helped us periodize eras, increased our understanding of migration, helped expand our understanding of the senses in non-Western cultures, furthered our understanding of environmental disasters and U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and informed animal as well as disability studies, see Mark M. Smith, A Sensory History Manifesto (2021), 71, 88, 65, 31, 66, 72, 96n7; Mark M. Smith, Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane (2011); and Mark M. Smith, Emporium, Imperium, Sensorium: How Listening to Nature Shaped U.S. Imperialism (work in progress).
[9] Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (2020).
[10] Bettina Hitzer, “The Odor of Disgust: Contemplating the Dark Side of 20th-Century Cancer History,” Emotion Review, 12 (no. 3, 2020), 156–67; Boddice and Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience, 42–43.
[11] Boddice and Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience; Jan Plamper, “Sounds of February, Smells of October: The Russian Revolution as Sensory Experience,” American Historical Review, 126 (March 2021), 140–65, esp. 142–43.
[12] Plamper, “Sounds of February, Smells of October,” 144, 146.
