Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

While Corbin listened to the French countryside, others have listened to the American city. In his 1970 essay, Hobsbawm identified "urban history" among the "growing-points" for social history. While he thought that "Urban history ... possesses a certain technologically determined unity," it was equally clear "that it raises problems peculiarly germane to social history, at least in the sense that the city can never be an analytical framework for economic macrohistory" principally because cities are not self contained, their economic and political functions necessarily articulate with one another, and they provide a microcosm of a raft of interrelated actions which range, for Hobsbawm, from the economic to the political to the psychological. As he remarked: "urban history must remain a central concern of historians of society, if only because it brings out--or can bring out--those specific aspects of societal change and structure with which sociologists and social psychologists are peculiarly concerned." (26)

Along these lines, Raymond Smilor (an historian of the environment whose work focuses on the urban), first in his 1978 dissertation, then in a series of articles, argued that the period 1893-1932 witnessed shifts in what was deemed productive and unproductive noise and saw a reclaiming of the desirability of relative silence and quietude in northern U.S. cities. As Smilor shows, the sounds of machinery and of the working classes in the late nineteenth century often constituted the sounds of modernity to the ears of many northern urban elites and were considered noise (necessary) to capitalist progress. Progressives, however, reconstituted the sound of modernity into the noise of modernity, painting not just the clamor of workers but also clanking machinery as atavistic, "inefficient," and premodern. They tried to deal with noisy modernity in all its forms by launching anti-noise crusades, legislating what constituted social noise and punishing transgressors, and by trying to make people and machines quieter. Reformers chastised working class discord, pressed milkmen to use rubber on bottles and carts to quiet (and convey the impression of greater efficiency of) their trade, and called for automobiles and various machines to be fitted with quiet ball bearings, gears, and better oil, all in an effort to dampen the excessive noise of the modern, the very thing northern elites of an earlier generation had applauded. (27) While Smilor is not especially sensitive to the mentalities or perceptions of aurality, his work on legal attempts to define noise, the political and economic implications of such efforts, the reaction against modernity, the role of consumption in combating noise, and the class tensions apparent in debates over what was necessary and unnecessary noise fit clearly within Hobsbawm's definition of social history.

Emily Thompson's superb study, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, treats the same period tackled by Smilor but benefits from a sure and sophisticated grasp of the science of acoustics. Thompson describes her book as "a history of aural culture," one charting "dramatic transformations in what people heard" and "equally significant changes in the ways that people listened." Thompson's study uses listening to give depth beyond the eye, "to recover more fully the texture of an era known as 'The Machine Age'," and to "comprehend more completely the experience of change."