Since The Foul and the Fragrant and Hubbub, I've been very interested in how historians can tease out the sensory history of a past era--Smith sets up this Civil War study with the fortuitous find of an 1853 magazine article on the senses, with the expectations of Americans of what they considered normal and desirable to see, hear, smell, taste and feel. The really crucial part isn't so much then what he finds about the war, it is the drastic shift in sense from "normal" to "wartime"--from the polite hush of Charleston society to boisterous troops shouting in the street, the expected smell of a freshly butchered animal or compost to the vast rotting of people and dead horses, the sight of geometric military formations rendered into the visual chaos of retreat or the Victorian expectation of privacy cramped into Vicksburg caves or the claustrophobic depths of the Hunley.