![]() ![]() There do seem to be substantial reasons for why we have continued to rely almost exclusively on text. Why have historians restricted themselves to written histories? Why only the monograph and journal article after the advent of the photo essay, the LP record, the radio show, documentary film, and animation short? It does so quite successfully and evocatively and achieves a rich unspoken analysis in its juxtaposition of different voices, words, and timbre.Ĭonfronted with the possibilities of communication in “Nancy,” one can’t help but ask, “why have historians neglected sound?” Despite more than a century and a half of ongoing media revolutions, historians-especially professional academic historians-have largely worked within a self-imposed textual ghetto. Offering a biographical history of development, “Nancy” narrates the phases and stages of a young girl’s early life. Poetic and expository, it reveals a type of storytelling that has an enigmatic intelligibility. “Nancy Grows Up” is more than a simple novelty piece. Schwartz likened what he did to time-lapse photography: it condenses the story of thirteen years, as Schwartz said, in less than two and a half minutes. It is an audio montage Tony Schwartz, its creator, continuously taped his niece from her first month of life to the age of thirteen and, later, spliced together pieces chronologically. Recorded over the course of the 1950s and the early 1960s, “Nancy Grows Up” gives us a beautiful and stimulating portrait of growth. In the last and longest of the voices, after updating us on what she has been doing at school, she sighs and confesses, “and I’ve been discovering boys.” Nancy becomes silent just after we see the door open on her developing sexuality. Finally, the recording ends, but it does so just as we witness what seems like a personal milestone. All the while Nancy’s voice grows increasingly distinct, speaks longer, takes on and sheds accents, and uses increasingly sophisticated vocabulary. We listen to her development as a person through a variety of situations: she wishes her father a happy birthday, she lists what she wants for Christmas (“a puppy and a whistle and a horn and a hat and a dress and a ballerina costume”), she explains how to housetrain a dog, and she expresses her feelings about the Russians sending the dog Laika into space. She fills in the appropriate words and, as she does, we suddenly meet her.įor the remaining minute and forty-two seconds we hear and follow Nancy. A man helps, playing a game with a familiar rhyme: “Jack and Jill went up the … to fetch a pail of … Jack fell down and broke his … and Jill came tumbling …” The sound repeats, then breaks into the rudiments of language. The plaintive sound only lasts a few moments before the screams drop into a slightly lower register and transform into a calm murmur. Graduate Program Administrator, College of Liberal Arts If, as historians, we took such a turn, we could open up new horizons for historical scholarship. Benjamin Breen, 2013, based on a photograph of Tony Schwartz in the 1950s ![]()
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