Visual Tumult 
John Demos
- Sensory Worlds in Early America by Peter Charles Hoffer Buy this book
As the long skein of historians’ interest continues to unwind – from its once dominant focus on politics and warfare, to the successively ‘new’ fields of intellectual, social and cultural history – the newest of the new is the senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell: each has a history, and each has beckoned to scholars for at least a decade.
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John Demos is the author of several books about colonial America, and is completing a study of witch-hunts. He teaches at Yale.