Imagining History Through Sound

Sounds from the clack of a clog dance to the trill of the Rebel Yell can powerfully engage and challenge young thinkers

Portrait of a Young Woman Singing. Johann Baptist Reiter (Austrian, 1813–1890)

Hi everyone!

When I was a kid, fairly imaginative and already fascinated by history, I used to play a little game some nights while I was trying to fall asleep. I would turn off the lights, get in bed, and close my eyes. And then I would ask myself:

• What can I feel touching my body right now?

• What can I smell right now?

• What can I taste right now?

• What can I see right now?

• What can I hear right now?

And after each question, I would ask myself: If I were in the 19th century, what would be different about this, and what would be the same?

Over time, I got pretty good at this game. My nightgown was cotton and it probably felt about the same as it would’ve 150 years before, only there would be no itchy tag. But it might have been wool — and that might have been itchy! My sheet likely would’ve felt the same, too, except that it might have had a seam down the middle from having been ripped in half, turned, and resewn in order to make it last longer.

I would not have smelled detergent on my sheets and clothes, and I might have smelled a fire from a hearth; but on the other hand, I would still smell myself and my cat.

I might have heard the train passing by outside my window, too. But would the whistle have sounded the same? What about the wheels?

I would almost certainly not have tasted toothpaste.

And yet…the black insides of my eyelids would almost certainly have been the same.

Imagine that.

Today, mental health professionals working with anxious or traumatized patients often recommend a similar activity called “somatic orienting.” One by one, the patient goes through his five senses and names a number of things he notices with them in his present location. It’s very grounding and helps defray anxiety and bring people troubled by traumatic memories firmly back into the safety of the present. (Note that anyone can benefit from this technique when getting a little flustered or anxious, not just those who are suffering from clinical diagnoses.)

My game of historical orienting shares something important with this practice. Although my childhood game had nothing to do with emotional struggles, using the senses to consider history is quite grounding. It is an excellent way of grounding a person in the realities of similarity and difference across time and space, of finding a way to stand squarely in the tension between “then” and “now.”

As a historian and a teacher, when I am asked for recommendations about teaching history, I often encourage parents to seek out sensory experiences for their children through which kids can learn not only what a historical figure might have tasted or touched, but also ways of correcting the historical imagination so that we don’t mistakenly apply our modern-day presumptions to people in the past. (I shared a little bit about this in this past weekend’s Unconformed Education Zoom discussion, hosted by

Ruth Gaskovski

.)

Today, I wanted to share a few recommendations on how to do this using hearing in particular, through historical sounds, and suggest questions you might ask when engaging with history in this manner.

Sound is usually not the first sense that comes to mind when we think about teaching history, largely because we have audio recordings from only a few decades of history. We might like to make a historical meal (taste!) or dress up in costumes (sight! touch!), but what can we hear that will help us really connect back to the past in our imaginations? Here are a few considerations, recommendations, and recordings to start you off:

1. Speech, Part A. What did English sound like in Chaucer’s day? Do your children really grasp how different English sounded back then, but also how the ear almost catches modern English within it? My high school English literature teacher read out parts of The Canterbury Tales to us in Middle English. Can you find someone who can do this for your children, or can you find a video online? For that matter, local variations in speech have been considerably flattened in the past 75-100 years; when you read The Secret Garden with your children, perhaps it is worth playing a striking video like this one so that they can understand how truly different Broad Yorkshire is from the Queen’s English. (College students and other adults would benefit from looking through

   Paul Kingsnorth
   ‘s Buckmaster Trilogy, which creatively represents language changing over time, and should read his note on this in the first volume of the trilogy.)

2. Language, Part B. Yesterday, my eldest daughter and a couple of college students who were over for dinner had a lively discussion about Jane Austen in which they wondered why Austen’s dialogue is so formal and extended. Surely people didn’t actually talk that way? Well, perhaps they did — or people of that social class did. In fact, even fifty years ago the common manners of speech in my country (the U.S.) were quite different, with polite and formal manners of speech considered considerably more important in the public sphere than they are today. Can you explore with your children differences between how people spoke today and how they did when you were a child (or your parents were children)? Can you give them examples?

3. Music, Part A. It’s now been about a century since recording music became common. I invite you to listen to three versions of the well-known children’s song, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” and ask yourself and your kids what you notice is the same or different across them (listen to the enunciation and the vowels, among other things):

   -1932, with careful enunciation as if on stage instead of into a mic:

• - 1950, crooned in the age of crooners:

• - 2013, lots of sliding, a kind of spooky or cautionary feel:

4. Music, Part B. What sort of music would particular people have heard at different time periods? What was it like when music was only ever heard live, when you had to make music or know someone who could make it in order to hear it?

   Leila Marie Lawler
   has mentioned before that it was common when she was a child for men to whistle as they walked around — is whistling common anymore? See if you can uncover an old songbook to use at the piano — or get a hold of musical albums based on folk or other older music (I recommend Anonymous 4’s album 1865 for a journey through mid-century American parlor music). I also have found it very powerful to play the Russian Imperial Anthem when teaching about Tsar Nicholas and his family and the Bolshevik Revolution — imagine, this music was like the soundtrack to the Imperial Family’s public life! Think of how often they would have heard it. And then think about what happened to them. Here is an actual contemporary recording, from 1914:

5. Crowd sounds. Sounds made communally often involve singing or music or the sounds of dancing (have you seen/heard this? My goodness—the rhythm!!). But we also forget that crowd sounds (like cheering and shouting and booing and rioting) are not necessarily the same across time and place. The best example I can give has to do with the mystery of the “Rebel Yell,” a fearsome battle cry given by Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. Re-enactors do their best to recreate it, but most of what we know is from descriptions written down by Union soldiers, who attempted to write it in syllables and said it sounded like something straight out of hell.

   Silly me, I thought I could recreate this sound, more or less, for my students, from these Union transcriptions. I thought it sounded something like “Ay yai yai yai yai!”

   Well, then I found this, full of trills(!) and yipping (you’ll note that it’s also a good example of formal speech patterns at such an occasion):

   What did the Rebel Yell sound like? (1930’s)

   Play that for your kids and see what they think. Do they think the battle cries are accurate? How would we know?

   (Why are there differences between the men — were the calls perhaps different across companies? Or have the men forgotten, or do they influence each other? Or is it likely mostly right, or right enough?)

   Then ask: do they think this is how soldiers shout in wartime today? Do they think that is how the last generations of Samurai would shout, in a similar time period but an entirely different location and culture?

   What about in war movies set in historical periods, such as the Patriot or Braveheart (okay, how does Mel Gibson shout when he imagines being a soldier might be the more accurate question)? Why do they shout the way they shout in the movies?

   Actually, strike that. I don’t recommend showing either of those movies to your young children!

   But do give these other things a listen, and let us know what you think!

Now, do tell us:

• How do you like to use the senses to explore history with your children?

• Or do you have favorite ways of using the senses to explore other subjects?

Warmly,

Dixie