This article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas, a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas, showing in each case how digital tools generate new insights. The first case uses mapping to reveal some of the specific ways in which the economic and social context of Jim Crow shaped the experiences of Black performers; the second integrates sound and text to reveal the origins of certain blues conventions in the racist stereotypes of minstrel shows; and the final case uses digital tools to argue that the marketing strategies of the recording industry throughout the Americas helped produce a key shift in patterns of globalization.

During the First World War, the term “essential business” was used initially in military procurement, and then in disease control when pandemic influenza struck. Essential businesses were exempt from restrictions imposed in the interest of national defense or public health, so debates about essential business concerned the necessity of various goods and services to the consumer. Ultimately, the concept of essential business depended on a shared understanding of the American consumer’s rights and duties as a citizen. On the one hand, consumers furthered the state’s interests by complying with, interpreting, implementing, and enforcing public-health restrictions. On the other, what contemporaries called “the American standard of living” entitled citizens to maintain relatively large expenditures. This relationship between citizenship and consumption explains the economy’s surprising stability in 1918. The flu did not cause a depression because social norms authorized most consumer expenditures as legitimate and appropriate, even during the wartime epidemic. “Essential” work is theorized using the Marxist concept of socially necessary labor, which relates productivity and purchasing power to norms of consumption.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Socialists in Wisconsin experienced a “golden age” of political successes in the state legislature. Whereas the 1920s are commonly seen as a period of socialist decline, Wisconsin Socialists entered the decade with a renewed sense of optimism. Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party. Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition. Socialists were vital to progressive reform prior to World War I; however, the Socialist-Progressive alliance reached its full potential in the 1920s. From 1919–31, the Wisconsin legislature passed 295 Socialist-authored pieces of legislation ranging from labor demands, public utilities, and criminal justice reform. Many of the proposals resulted from negotiations between the Socialist and Progressive caucuses. The success of the Wisconsin Socialists—and their alliance with progressive Republicans—suggests that at least in some places the Progressive Era extended into the 1920s.

In an examination of three cylinder recordings from 1889, this essay compares the context for their original production with the experience of hearing them again in 2019, thanks to IRENE, a twenty-first century suite of state-of-the-art techniques and equipment designed to recover sound from old recordings otherwise considered unplayable. This pairing offers an opportunity to examine how each period envisioned the technical opportunities and social purpose of these new sound technologies in their respective times. Inspired by the work of Sheila Jasanoff and others who have developed the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries,” this analysis focuses on the role of listeners’ imaginations and asks how their notions shaped the meaning, use, and material aspects of recorded sound and playback. As a contribution to sound studies, this comparative look manifests the field’s attention to both sonic phenomena and the means by which we come to know and experience those phenomena.

In recent years, the history of sound has developed into a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship. This article explores the benefits of considering sonic evidence alongside a host of other material; teaching and writing histories with—rather than of—sound. In the classroom, this kind of “history with sound” is particularly useful for its ability to cut across lines of scholarly inquiry. This makes sound an especially potent resource when teaching the history of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. During these years, American society underwent a many-sided process of development difficult to adequately narrativize. The study of sound, with its ability to link numerous trends and dynamics within densely layered events, can help address this issue. Providing insight into the practices and problems of everyday life, such sonic history can reveal the interplay of change and continuity that defined the social experience of the turn-of-the-century United States. Focused on sound in New York, this article provides an overview of the topic’s historiography before examining a series of distinct case studies for classroom use.

Between Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 and World War I, inventors, entrepreneurs, performers, and listeners transformed the singular talking machines of the late 1870s to the ubiquitous music machines of the twentieth century. Through selected images, objects, and links to period sounds, this essay offers a chronological glimpse of interacting social, technical, and entrepreneurial forces at work. Combining visual, aural, and material sources in this way enlarges the historian’s toolbox for understanding the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This roundtable reflects on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard, 1998), a classic in our field.