Richard C. Rath

Richard Cullen Rath

Is associate professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He teaches courses on early America, Native Americans, and the history of media and the senses. He is the author of How Early America Sounded and is currently working on two books, one an introduction to the history of hearing and the other comparing the rise of print culture in eighteenth-century North America to the rise of internet culture today. He has also written three award-winning articles on music, creolization and African American culture. In addition, Rath is a musician who has found ways to use music to “do” history whenever possible.

Hi,
For Spring of 2010, I am teaching a survey of American History to 1865 (Hist 281) and Native American History (Hist 460).

I am back from my very productive year of traveling, having undertaken research in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York and then serving as visiting resident scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was also a research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. I capped off my travels with a visit to the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in San Diego right before the beginning of the semester, where I performed reconstructions of a seventeenth-century African musical instrument I constructed, sampled, and then played with my guitar for the presidential plenary session. It was a blast, I managed to get through with my strings intact and no major electronic mishaps, and met or reconnected with lots of great people. If you want to see and hear the general topic I talked and played about, see this blog entry.

I missed Hawai‘i, including teaching at UH, by the end of my stay and I'm tired of traveling and glad to be back, at least until the summer break, when I hit the road again to do research at the Huntington Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. If you are curious,

You can find out more about How Early America Sounded and the history of sound here.
Students at Oberlin College, Hamilton College, and UHI helped me develop a musical hypertext edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.
Here are some history-related bookmarks.
You can find out a little more about me—including some of my music, and copies of some articles I've written—here if you are interested.

That's it for now!
Rich Rath