Download The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War AudioBook Free
Historical accounts of major happenings have more often than not relied after what those who were there observed. Nowhere is this truer than in the nerve-shattering chaos of warfare, where vision seems to confer objective real truth and acts as the foundation of reconstruction. In The Smell of Fight, the Taste of Siege, historian Draw M. Smith considers how all five senses, including vision, shaped the knowledge of the Civil Battle and thus its memory, exploring its full sensory effect on everyone from the soldiers on the field to the civilians holding out at home. From eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of conflict at Fort Sumter to the stench made by the corpses lying down in the midsummer sunshine at Gettysburg to the siege of Vicksburg, once a centre of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into distribution, Smith recreates how the Civil Battle was believed and lived. Relying on firsthand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for every single event, offering a wholly new point of view. At Bull Run the similarities between your colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms created concern over what later would be called "friendly fireplace" and helped make a decision the outcome of the first major fight simply because nobody was quite sure they could believe their sight. He evokes what it might have felt prefer to maintain the HL Hunley submarine, where eight men performed cheek by jowl in near-total darkness in an area 48 ins high and 42 inches wide. Often argued to be the first "total war", the Civil Battle overwhelmed the senses because of its unprecedented dynamics and scope, making vision less reliable and, Smith shows, forcefully interesting the nonvisual senses. Sherman's March was little less than a full-blown assault on Southern sense and sensibility, going out of nothing untouched and nobody unaffected. Unique, powerful, and interesting, The Smell of Fight, The Taste of Siege offers listeners a way to experience the Civil Battle with fresh sight.
