Mark M Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 376202 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark M Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark M |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH M M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Carolina |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4153-4335 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 28 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Capitalism and the Senses
A Sensory History Manifesto
Sound—So What
“Sound—So What?” proposes to answer the following questions: Why listen to the past? What are the interpretive dividends of paying attention to sounds, noises, and silences? What do we lose by not listening? The article answers these questions by charting how some key works in historical acoustemology have enhanced, textured, and revised our understanding of US history for all eras. The article examines how key themes in the history of religion, …
Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi
Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This …
French Caribbean
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in the French Caribbean. Pierre d'Esnambuc, a Norman sailor, planted France's first Caribbean colony on the tiny Lesser Antillean island of St Christopher in 1625. The settlement contained several dozen slaves. Although Great Britain removed this French foothold at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), slavery expanded under French auspices, albeit in …
Internal Slave Trades
This article reviews scholarship on internal slave trades in the Americas. Intra-regional slave trades in the Americas have often left few records and have been little noticed by historians. In many cases, historians have probably ignored significant inter-regional trades that pre-dated the era of abolition. The internal slave trades that have been most researched are long-distance trades that operated under the critical attention of active aboli…
Religion and Slavery
This article reviews scholarship on the religious lives of slaves. The emergent field of Atlantic history has profoundly influenced scholarship on the response of African slaves to Christianity, the nature of black Christianity in the Americas, and the ways that black Christianity differed from that of whites. The study of the religious lives of enslaved peoples in the Americas has benefited enormously from the work of historians and anthropologi…
The Origins of Slavery in the Americas
This article offers an overview of the rise of African slavery in English America. Several propositions are useful in ordering the historical record. The most important is that transitions to African slavery in the several colonies of England's emerging empire can be better understood if Britain's Atlantic world is approached as a single if imperfect and fragile labour market, and if variations in the composition of the workforce among colonies a…
Slave Culture
This article reviews scholarship on slave culture and the slave experience. Historians of the American South have had an interest in slavery since the early twentieth century but not until fairly recently have they paid sustained attention to the enslaved. Historians have begun to examine slaves, providing a bottom-up analysis of how slavery and slaves shaped their culture, daily lives, and southern white culture generally. This more recent empha…
Biology and African Slavery
This article reviews scholarship on the biology of African slaves. Mother Africa ensured that her sons and daughters could tolerate a disease environment sufficiently harsh that it served as a barrier to European outsiders for many centuries, keeping them confined to the coast and, save for some notable exceptions, away from the interior. Falciparum malaria and yellow fever, however, the chief ramparts in this barrier, did not remain confined to …
Proslavery Ideology
This article shows how the same fundamental questions raised by proslavery thought have consistently confronted not only modern scholars but also the very historical actors who battled over slavery's fate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It discusses early proslavery thought in the Americas, proslavery thought in the age of revolution, the role of proslavery thought in sectional conflict and postbellum sectional reconciliation, and the…
Cuba
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Cuba. In the sixteenth-century, Africans crossed the Atlantic and accompanied Diego Velésquez and other Spanish conquistadors in the first expeditions sent to subjugate Cuba. Africans served in post-conquest Cuba as enslaved assistants to powerful military and political officials or as domestic servants. During the nineteenth-century heyday of plantation slavery, Cub…
Comparative Slavery
This article first briefly reviews the historiography of comparative slavery, so as to identify the main trends and changes it went through. It then provides a summary of the state of the art of comparative studies in the three main historical periods in which slavery flourished in the Americas: the colonial period (sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries), the revolutionary period (roughly 1770–1820), and the nineteenth century. At the heart of t…
Slave Resistance
This article discusses the historiography of slave resistance. Despite persistent attempts by historians to force a uniformity of vision and goals on rebel leaders, insurgent slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed from one another fully as much as white revolutionaries in the same era. If slave rebellions in North America correspond to any one model, it is that they proliferated during times when the white majority was divided…
Post‐Emancipation Adjustments
The demise of slavery in the Western hemisphere unfolded in a remarkably short period of time, in roughly 100 years. Yet, the various emancipations hardly realized the rosy scenario predicted by their most ardent advocates. The history of post-emancipation societies poses multiple questions — some unanswered, others the matter of continuing debate — about the meaning of freedom and the costs borne by different groups of historical actors. This ar…
Spanish South American Mainland
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in the Spanish South American Mainland. The history of African slaves on the South American mainland began with the Spanish conquistadors in the early sixteenth century. Already present in the West Indies and Mexico following the Spanish conquest and settlement of those areas, slaves now became involved in the expansion of Spanish rule southward. Small numbers accompani…
Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, its island neighbour to the east, rank as two of the Western hemisphere's most racially mixed societies. Historical factors related in one way or another to slavery account for the high degree of racial admixture. Both countries experienced ensla…
Class and Slavery
This article reviews scholarship on class and slavery. The evolution of the historiography on class and slavery is complex, and historians have only recently begun to revisit some of their basic assumptions about class formation, class ideology, and the social structure of the Old South more broadly. New studies raise questions about the ways in which human bondage and class intertwined in slave societies, particularly the American South, and hav…
Brazil
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil. Brazil possessed a more varied slave economy with a much larger sector producing for the internal market than scholars had previously thought. The already large slave population of Minas Gerais increased dramatically from 168,543 in 1819 to 381,893 in 1872. Minas Gerais consisted of an intricate mercantile system based on slave labour that not only supplied f…
Slavery and the Haitian Revolution
This article reviews scholarship on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The revolution stands as the only one in history to have destroyed a society in which slaves performed almost all productive labour and constructed on top of the rubble a nation-state in which slavery was prohibited. This unique phenomenon resonated throughout the transatlantic world, with repercussions in the imperial capitals of western Europe and throughout every slavehold…
Indian Slavery
Indian slavery was neither fleeting nor secondary to the story of colonialism, imperialism, and economic exploitation in the Americas. Persisting for centuries, it both pre-dated African slavery in the Americas, and survived African slavery's abolition in the United States. Not until the American government's five-year program to eradicate Indian slavery in Colorado and Utah after the American Civil War did slavery officially end, though it likel…
Finding Slave Voices
The aims of this article are twofold. First, it traces the broad contours of the historiography, examining the myriad ways in which scholars have come to incorporate the slave perspective in studies of slavery. Having established the general trajectory of this search through the 1970s, it examines the ways in which slaves' voices have led scholars to important insights in one particular area of study — the political, social, and economic implicat…
Colonial and Revolutionary United States
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in colonial and revolutionary United States. Slavery was a southern American institution associated primarily with cotton and a divinely ordained labour force of blacks. Southerners in the Chesapeake might realize that slaves once produced tobacco, and in low-country South Carolina and Georgia that they once grew rice, and in southern Louisiana that they once raised sug…
Transcending, othering, detecting: Smell, premodernity, modernity
Slavery in the Americas
This article presents a general discussion of slavery in the Americas. Slavery in the Americas pre-dated Columbus, but once taking root in the Americas under western European auspices, acquired a predominantly commercial character whose benefaction to the sustained economic growth of the Western world no serious scholar can any longer doubt. The introduction of slavery into the New World affected indigenous peoples in many ways, sometimes drawing…
Producing Sense, Comsuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History
Journal Article Producing Sense, Comsuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History Get access Mark M. Smith Mark M. Smith Department of History, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 40, Issue 4, Summer 2007, Pages 841–858, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0116 Published: 01 July 2007
Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
Sound, sectionalism, and the coming of the Civil War; Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free - to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War - we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard. Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived…
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery and Freedom in the American South
Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion
ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1739, SIXTY-ODD SOUTH CAROLINA SLAVES took up arms and revolted, killing, as one terrified contemporary styled it, twenty-three Whites after the most cruel and barbarous Manner.(1) While there is no direct testimony regarding the insurgents' motives in the Stono rebellion, an analysis of some hitherto unexamined sources, bolstered by logic, forensic reconstruction, and a detailed understanding of the insurgents' and Cathol…
Old South Time in Comparative Perspective
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth…
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexic…
Making Sense of Social History
Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm's thinking on the meaning and nature of social history, this essay explores how the field has influenced recent work on the history of the senses, particularly work on historical aurality. By reviewing work on sensory history, the essay argues that social history seems to have been important to historical work on sound, noise, hearing, listening, and olfaction especially. It points to how social history's emphasis on the …
Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South
Author's preface 1. The contours of the debate 2. Slaveholders and plantations 3. Yeoman and non-slave-owners 4. Slaves 5. The profitability of slavery as a business 6. The profitability of slavery as a system 7. New directions, toward consensus Bibliography
Still Coming to "Our" Senses: An Introduction
It took a historian of visual culture to issue a call for a fully expanded sensory treatment of United States history. Almost fifteen years ago, in pages of Journal of American History, late George H. Roeder Jr. claimed that ours is a nearly sense-less profession. Roeder's arresting complaint was based on a detailed search for analytically significant smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and tactile sensations associated with twentieth-century U.S. hi…
Analyzing Farm Layout and Farmstead Architecture
This article refines the analysis through a discussion of how arhcaeological data recovered from individual farmstead ites were incorporated into the GIS database
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
Masters
This article focuses on southern slaveholders. Slave ownership in the South varied considerably, from region to region, from farm to plantation, and from settled society to frontier. Unlike their counterparts in the British and French Caribbean, antebellum southern masters tended to be residents not absentees. Unlike their counterparts in nineteenth-century Cuba and Brazil, they presided over an American-born slave population since the mid-eighte…
Race and Slavery
This article focuses on the concept of ‘race’ and how Americans of various sorts understood it, particularly in relation to slavery. The discussion covers early constructions of race, the introduction of slavery to the Americas, the ‘mixed-race’ problem, the problem of poor whites, and race and Native Americans
Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom
Journal Article Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom Get access Mark M. Smith Mark M. Smith Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 95, Issue 2, September 2008, Pages 381–391, https://doi.org/10.2307/25095624 Published: 01 September 2008
Finding Deficiency: On Eugenics, Economics, and Certainty
In these comments, Professor Smith discusses the preceding group of symposium papers and reminds us that eugenic ideas are still part of the society in which we live
The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina
This is not a run-of-the-mill, parochial, local study. Because North Carolina's African American community was connected so intimately to the Atlantic world, David S. Cecel-ski necessarily frames his study in ways that extend far beyond the North Carolina coastline. That Cecelski does so admirably makes this a fine book, refreshing in its scope even as it attends wonderfully to the details of local life. Cecelski sees his study as contributing to…
Culture, Commerce, and Calendar Reform in Colonial America
A CKNOWLEDGED more than understood, the I752 reform of the calendar in colonial America illustrates nicely Norbert Elias's observation that knowledge of calendar time . . . is taken for granted to the point where it escapes reflection. Indeed, in contrast to the British experience, there is virtually no work on the way the calendar shift affected colonial America. Instead, historians have focused on the form and content of colonial calendars (pri…
Transcending, othering, detecting: Smell, premodernity, modernity
Archaeology and Slavery
Archaeology provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of slavery that combines analyses of archaeological findings with careful readings of traditional primary sources of historiography. Excavations of sites where enslaved people once lived and worked yield residue of things produced, consumed, and discarded by the former occupants of these sites. This article discusses plantation spatial organization and the built environment of slaver…
Demography and Slavery
This article discusses the demographic history of slavery. It covers the origins of African slavery, dimensions of the African slave trade, distribution of the slave population in 1825, health and mortality of slave populations, plantation conditions in the United States and in the sugar colonies, and fertility
The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas
The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers authoritative articles on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With articles on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, this book has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic articles on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, and historical methodol…
Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South
and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in Deep South. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxv, 490. Figures, maps, tables. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $25.00.) Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond; Virginia,1782-1865. By Midori Takagi. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. xi, 187. Illustrations, tables. $37.50.) Order, remarked Alexander Pope in An …
Counting Clocks, Owning Time: Detailing and Interpreting Clock and Watch Ownership in the American South, 1739-1865
Despite much excellent work on the historical evolution of the concepts of time and time-discipline, little is known about the incidence of clock and watch ownership in what have been perceived as `task-oriented' societies. This article attempts to expand our historical knowledge of mechanical timepiece ownership in both urban and rural areas of the antebellum South (pre-1865) in the USA. Moreover, it speculates as to what it meant to own a clock…
Windrushers and orbiters: Towards an understanding of the ‘official mind’ and colonial immigration to Britain 1945–51
In conjunction with the problems created by mainstream British racism, civil service officials encountered real administrative and logistical difficulties following the arrival of black colonial immigrants to Britain in the immediate post‐war period. Despite the collaboration of both Ministry of Labour and Colonial Office civil servants, the post‐war ‘official mind’ proved unable to deal successfully with even the relatively few colonial arrivals…
Windrushers and orbiters: Towards an understanding of the ‘official mind’ and colonial immigration to Britain 1945–51
In conjunction with the problems created by mainstream British racism, civil service officials encountered real administrative and logistical difficulties following the arrival of black colonial immigrants to Britain in the immediate post‐war period. Despite the collaboration of both Ministry of Labour and Colonial Office civil servants, the post‐war ‘official mind’ proved unable to deal successfully with even the relatively few colonial arrivals…
Counting Clocks, Owning Time: Detailing and Interpreting Clock and Watch Ownership in the American South, 1739-1865
Despite much excellent work on the historical evolution of the concepts of time and time-discipline, little is known about the incidence of clock and watch ownership in what have been perceived as `task-oriented' societies. This article attempts to expand our historical knowledge of mechanical timepiece ownership in both urban and rural areas of the antebellum South (pre-1865) in the USA. Moreover, it speculates as to what it meant to own a clock…
Old South Time in Comparative Perspective
Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South
Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate. Similar questions concerning the profitability of slavery, its impact on masters, slaves, and nonslaveowners still inform modern historical debates. Is the slave South best characterized as a capitalist society? Or did its dogged adherence to non-wage labor render it precapi…
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth…
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
Culture, Commerce, and Calendar Reform in Colonial America
A CKNOWLEDGED more than understood, the I752 reform of the calendar in colonial America illustrates nicely Norbert Elias's observation that knowledge of calendar time . . . is taken for granted to the point where it escapes reflection. Indeed, in contrast to the British experience, there is virtually no work on the way the calendar shift affected colonial America. Instead, historians have focused on the form and content of colonial calendars (pri…
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery and Freedom in the American South
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South
and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in Deep South. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxv, 490. Figures, maps, tables. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $25.00.) Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond; Virginia,1782-1865. By Midori Takagi. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. xi, 187. Illustrations, tables. $37.50.) Order, remarked Alexander Pope in An …
Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837
Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860
Journal Article Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860. By Michele Gillespie. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. xxiv, 236 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-82031968-6.) Get access Mark M. Smith Mark M. Smith University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1486, https…
Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion
ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1739, SIXTY-ODD SOUTH CAROLINA SLAVES took up arms and revolted, killing, as one terrified contemporary styled it, twenty-three Whites after the most cruel and barbarous Manner.(1) While there is no direct testimony regarding the insurgents' motives in the Stono rebellion, an analysis of some hitherto unexamined sources, bolstered by logic, forensic reconstruction, and a detailed understanding of the insurgents' and Cathol…
Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South
Author's preface 1. The contours of the debate 2. Slaveholders and plantations 3. Yeoman and non-slave-owners 4. Slaves 5. The profitability of slavery as a business 6. The profitability of slavery as a system 7. New directions, toward consensus Bibliography
Echoes in Print: Method and Causation in Aural History
Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
Sound, sectionalism, and the coming of the Civil War; Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free - to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War - we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard. Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived…
Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
Journal Article Listening to Nineteenth-Century America Get access Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. By Smith Mark M.. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii, 372 pp. Cloth, $55.00, isbn0-8078-2657-X. Paper, $19.95, isbn0-8078-4982-0.) Edward E. Baptist Edward E. Baptist University of MiamiCoral Gables, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume …
The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina
This is not a run-of-the-mill, parochial, local study. Because North Carolina's African American community was connected so intimately to the Atlantic world, David S. Cecel-ski necessarily frames his study in ways that extend far beyond the North Carolina coastline. That Cecelski does so admirably makes this a fine book, refreshing in its scope even as it attends wonderfully to the details of local life. Cecelski sees his study as contributing to…
Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
Analyzing Farm Layout and Farmstead Architecture
This article refines the analysis through a discussion of how arhcaeological data recovered from individual farmstead ites were incorporated into the GIS database
Making Sense of Social History
Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm's thinking on the meaning and nature of social history, this essay explores how the field has influenced recent work on the history of the senses, particularly work on historical aurality. By reviewing work on sensory history, the essay argues that social history seems to have been important to historical work on sound, noise, hearing, listening, and olfaction especially. It points to how social history's emphasis on the …
Finding Deficiency: On Eugenics, Economics, and Certainty
In these comments, Professor Smith discusses the preceding group of symposium papers and reminds us that eugenic ideas are still part of the society in which we live
The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech
Producing Sense, Comsuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History
Journal Article Producing Sense, Comsuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History Get access Mark M. Smith Mark M. Smith Department of History, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 40, Issue 4, Summer 2007, Pages 841–858, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0116 Published: 01 July 2007
A Sense of History
History (53 works) · Political science (49 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Law (36 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (33 works) · History (25 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Economic history (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Historiography (15 works)