Hearing American History

I came to the history of sound and hearing by chance as an undergraduate. I was reading Keith Thomasś Religion and the Decline of Magic and David D. Hallś Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment for a class that covered folk beliefs in old and New England. When I started working with some of the primary sources Hall and Thomas used, I noticed that where the two historians usually referred to beliefs about lightning, the sources spoke of thunder. I asked what that inconsistency meant and decided to look some more.1 I found more odd substitutions of the same sort that piqued my interest in the history of sound: A nineteenth-century pamphlet on thunderstorms in seventeenth-century New England changed thunder to lightning. The antiquarian Sidney Perley noted in his 1891 book about storms in colonial New England that “it was generally supposed that thunder and not lightning caused the damage,” though he gave no explanation for the supposition or why it changed. With the exception of attention to “oral culture,” which, as we shall see, is not historically well-grounded, after Perleyś observations this older audible world slipped from historical consciousness.2