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Histories with Sound: Using Noise and Music to Teach (and Research) the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2023

Samuel E. Backer Open the ORCID record for Samuel E. Backer [Opens in a new window]
Samuel E. Backer*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
*
Email: samuel.e.backer@gmail.com
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Abstract

In recent years, the history of sound has developed into a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship. This article explores the benefits of considering sonic evidence alongside a host of other material; teaching and writing histories with—rather than of—sound. In the classroom, this kind of “history with sound” is particularly useful for its ability to cut across lines of scholarly inquiry. This makes sound an especially potent resource when teaching the history of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. During these years, American society underwent a many-sided process of development difficult to adequately narrativize. The study of sound, with its ability to link numerous trends and dynamics within densely layered events, can help address this issue. Providing insight into the practices and problems of everyday life, such sonic history can reveal the interplay of change and continuity that defined the social experience of the turn-of-the-century United States. Focused on sound in New York, this article provides an overview of the topic’s historiography before examining a series of distinct case studies for classroom use.

Keywords

musichistory of soundhistory of the sensescultural historyNew York
Type
Teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Special Issue: New Approaches to Music and Sound in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , October 2023 , pp. 475 - 485
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

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