This introduction to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s special issue, “New Approaches to Music and Sound,” provides a historical sketch of American music and the American soundscape at the turn of the twentieth century. It also offers a discussion of relevant historiography, taking stock of recent work in sound studies and its influence on research on music and sound of the period. Finally, it introduces the four research articles featured in this special issue and marks their contributions to our understandings of listening practices, normative understandings of audition and speech, and the sonic dimensions of politics and capitalism, race and national identity, imaginings of the past and visions for the future in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the early twentieth century, the publishers of Tin Pan Alley revolutionized American music. Focused on the dissemination of a constantly changing set of attention-grabbing songs, leading companies dramatically expanded the market for popular compositions, generating hits that sold millions of copies of sheet music to customers across the country. While publishers aimed at this continental audience, their output was shaped by the urban context in which their businesses first emerged. During these years, local popularity was crucial to national success. As a result, firms sought to engage with new audiences throughout Manhattan, incorporating a host of social and ethnic groups into the structures of commercial entertainment. Over time, Tin Pan Alley’s relationship to these groups—and the distinctive leisure spaces in which they gathered—would define its musical production. It was not simply that publishers molded songs to fit public taste. Rather, the industry and the broader world of commercial entertainment developed together. By exploring this business-influenced process of cultural change, it is possible to gain new perspective on the emergence of American popular song, as well as the consumption-driven dynamics remaking society in the Progressive Era in the United States.

With the United States’ entrance into the First World War, linguistic and cultural cohesiveness became imperative, compelling everyone—from immigrants with foreign accents to people with speech problems and hearing loss—to “sound American” by fluently speaking the language of their flag.

This article examines lip-reading, speech, and auricular training prescribed to deaf and hard-of-hearing children as well as for servicemen deafened in the war to demonstrate how World War I demanded all Americans to contribute to and participate in shared national soundscapes, regardless of their hearing status. Use of American Sign Language was considered a conspicuous sign of one’s failure to integrate into hearing society, and it shared parallels with immigrants who failed to learn English and fully assimilate into American culture. Indeed, rehabilitation of deafened soldiers of the First World War through speech training and lip-reading instruction at Hospital No. 11 at Cape May, New Jersey, coincided with broader national efforts to improve Americans’ speech and language use, and in turn, their patriotism and productivity.

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.

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.