Exhibits
Sound
In colonial America, space and time were ordered by the sounding of bells. Richard Cullen Rath explains that changes in church acoustics reinforced social distinctions. The association of sound with social and racial distinctions was part of the pre-war South and extended through recorded sound to contemporary ideas about sound and noise.
Sight
Text based information and enlightenment ideals gave primacy to vision in 17th and 18th century culture. New scientific and technological advances in the 19th century, challenged the reliabilty of vision and embodied the experience of sight in the workings of the eye.
Smell
The Enlightenment devalued the sense of smell in favor of the most noble sense, sight. Constance Classen's history of the rose proves that the smell of the rose held less importance in Enlightenment Europe and was prized for it's visual beauty.
Taste
Transportation and refridgeration innovations resulted in transformations in the experence and value of certain foods and flavors, but the importance of taste to ethnic and national identity is a running thread in the history of the sense.
Touch
Some scholars argue that the sense of touch, traditionally linked directly to vision, experienced somewhat of a decline of importance in the early 19th century when new optical devices seperated the formerly necessarily relationship between touch and sight. Other scholars argue that touch contined to have important historical and social meanings.