Echoes of War:
How Martial Senses Linger and Why They Matter

Mark M. Smith
Carolina Distinguished Professor of History
Department of History
University of South Carolina

Of late, historians of the senses have shown a healthy respect for the sensory experiences of war on both battlefield and home front. Unpacking and documenting what we might think of as “martial senses” has proven intellectually invigorating and granted us access to deeper understandings of a number of wars in a wide variety of places and times. Far less appreciated is how these war-time sensory experiences carried into peace time. Did they, in fact, linger? If so, what kind of work did memories of martial senses perform and for whom? Taking the US Civil War as its starting point, this paper examines how sensory experiences and memories of that war shaped the United States’ immediate postwar foreign policy. Martial senses from the Civil War were redeployed in the context of US imperialist initiatives after the War and proved especially important for shaping contemporaries’ experience and understanding of how environmental disasters interacted with US foreign policy. The paper surveys the work done to date on the sensory history of war, presents a detailed case study of martial sensory echoes, and concludes by pondering how thinking about those echoes helps us appreciate ways in which wars, though temporally delimited by historians, hold the power to expand and continue the experience of war. Sensory echoes of war matter because they influence perceptions during times of peace; appreciating their lingering echoes invites us to wonder whether war ever truly ends.

Date

Thursday 13 February 2025
15:30 (Utrecht Time)

Location

University Museum Utrecht | UMU 
Lange Nieuwstraat 106, 3512 PN Utrecht

Registration

Entrance is free, but registration compulsory since seats are limited: sensis@uu.nl

We look forward to seeing you!