When Sound Matters: The Case of Sonic Booms

Integrating sound into the study of history is more than a matter of saying “Sound was there too!” Rather, historical scholarship on sound should demonstrate ways that sound mattered—that is, when it was historically consequential or when thinking about sound affords insights that would not otherwise be available. This presentation illustrates this point by focusing on a case study: the history of sonic booms in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s. Not only were sonic booms intensely debated, but they functioned in a way that reveals new dimensions of the power of the national security state. That is, conflicts over sound show how the state interacted with citizens on a sensorial and somatic level during the Cold War, beyond the level of political and ideological discourse. Likewise, sonic booms offer a perspective on how the national security state operated at the scale of individuals and local communities, who sometimes resisted and pushed back against national initiatives. When the issue of sonic booms became central to the campaign against the supersonic transport (SST), the politics of sound also helped shape the early environmental movement, and the defeat of the SST in 1971 stands as an important, though little remembered, early victory in the history of modern environmentalism.