Between the years 1775 and 1934, the United States waged a little-known war—not for land, gold, or faith, but for silence.
The Quieting of a Nation uncovers a two-century campaign to control the sonic life of the continent, tracing how Indigenous drumming, song, and ceremony were systematically outlawed, recorded, reinterpreted, and finally erased from the public ear.This is not a history of conquest as territory, but of frequency: churches tuned to drown out the drum; schools enforcing the stillness of “civilization”; phonographs re-encoding sacred songs as data to be archived, not heard. Drawing from missionary journals, ethnographic field notes, and a set of reconstructed “silent cylinders,” the book exposes a covert acoustic war that shaped the modern American soundscape.
Part cultural archaeology, part speculative dossier, The Quieting of a Nation reassembles fragments of lost resonance—notes smuggled into hymnals, coded rhythms in boarding school music lessons, faint drumming ghosted beneath wax cylinder hiss. It argues that silence itself became a national instrument, engineered to suppress voices that vibrated outside the sanctioned harmony of the Republic.
Presented as a recovered government study interwoven with the field reports of a fictional ethnomusicologist, the book charts the slow weaponization of quiet: from early missionary bans on “heathen noise” to the bureaucratic acoustics of the Indian Reorganization Act. What emerges is not absence, but a haunted resonance—the sound of resistance that refused to be extinguished.
The Quieting of a Nation is a work of forensic listening, historical speculation, and moral archaeology. It invites readers to hear what history tried to mute—and to understand America not as a land of freedom, but as a sound field of contested frequencies, where silence was victory and the drum was rebellion.
The Silencing of a 1000 Nations: America’s Campaign Against Sound
Kai Cosay-Holt