Sensory worlds in early America

the long version

Over the past half-century, historians have greatly enriched our understanding of America's past. We now know that homes and workplaces form a part of our history as important as battlefields and the corridors of power. In this new work, 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 New World: 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 traces the effect sensation and perception had on the cause and course of events conventionally attributed to deeper cultural and material circumstances. 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.--From publisher description.