A Touch of History

             Mark Smith's book Sensing the Past was our reading for this past week. In Sensing the Past, Smith examines how the senses such as; seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching are all important pieces of history that tend to be overlooked. Prior to reading this book, I never thought about how one can experience history through senses. However, Smith makes a point that the use of sense gives an important insight into history that can easily be overlooked. We tend to experience some of these senses collectively and naturally assume that they go hand in hand. One could argue that the sense of seeing and touching are very similar, however sight and touch are two different things. In Smith’s chapter about touching he speaks about the handshake and how important handshakes are in our society. There is a history being a strong handshake, however as our society has developed the concept of a strong handshake the sense of touch is used to develop this history.

             In addition to the chapter that delved into the sense of touch, I also found the chapter that examined the sense of hearing to be interesting. Smith stated that the sense of hearing was used to bridge together sight and other weaker sense such as taste. Naturally when we think about the concept of sound we think of some sort of noise. However, Smith states that during the slavery period many slaves used the concept of silence, no sound, as a way to stand their ground and disobey their masters. The slaves were able to control when and where they sang songs from their culture, it was one of the only things that the slaves were able to control. One could imagine how important the sense of sound was to the history of slavery in the country.

            The overall theme of Smith’s book was that we as the culture have the ability to look at history not only through the sense of sight, however we can use the sense of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching to further our understanding of history.  This overall theme made me think about my Trousseau dress in a different light. How would the dress feel on the individuals skin? Was the silk smooth as we believe?  Would the dress naturally generate a certain noise as the young woman walked around in it? These are all questions that involve the concept of sense and would give us a more in depth understanding of our objects.