An Emotional History of the United States (review)

Emotions have come increasingly under the research spotlight in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history. This landmark anthology of 23 new papers about emotions in American history outlines basic questions for a history of emotions and fills in some areas of that “map” with insightful research. As a sociologist studying emotions, I am delighted by the research here; it is intellectually provocative, genuinely interesting, and painstakingly edited. The volume begins with an introduction by editors Jan Lewis and Peter N. Stearns reviewing the development of emotions history. Historians have long made assumptions about the emotions of crowds, lower classes, and other groups. But family history and the history of everyday life, aiming “to recapture the way history felt,” have provided the major impetus for an emotions history. The editors ask what social forces determine which emotions are regarded as important or problematic during an era? What are the historical turning-points for variation in feeling, expression, and emotional standards? What social factors determine how closely emotional experience is aligned with cultural expectations for emotion? How are prescriptive standards for an emotion connected to other facets of society, such as economy or gender roles?

In an opening essay psychologist Kenneth Gergen contrasts an “essentialist” view of emotions as relatively concrete transhistorical phenomena versus a radical social constructionist view that an emotion is unique to its historical moment. How consistent or transferable is an emotion over time as being the same experience? Since contributors to this volume assume some continuity of an emotion over history, Gergen’s essay offers an alternative perspective for this new field.

The anthology divides its papers into six sections. “The Creation of an American Emotional Style: Class, Gender, and Race” focuses on the period from the Revolution to the beginning of the Civil War. Lucia McMahon analyzes romantic friendship between women and men communicated through exchanged journals and poetry. Jeffrey Steele describes the mourning rituals that women were expected to know for the frequent home funerals in antebellum America. In an analysis of sympathy and affection, Jan Lewis compares the emotional satisfactions of private life versus political public life in Jeffersonian America. C. Dallett Hemphill explains how the emergence of an ambitious middle-class fostered an advice literature on impression management, which counseled that one’s inner state can be different from external appearance. In reading these essays, I noted that the “emotions” of the era included pride, familiarity, bashfulness, reverence, and “easiness,” among others. I found myself asking, what defines “an emotion” for an emotions history? Other chapters in this volume examine love, friendship, grief, mourning, shame, guilt, religious sentiments, and envy. What properties do these topics have in common that would constitute them as a new field, if a field at all? Is friendship an emotion? Is ambition? Are there boundaries to this field, or are all subjective experiences included? Do “emotions” for the historian share dimensions connecting emotions history to emotions research in psychology, sociology, and anthropology?

The second group of papers is categorized under “Emotional Expression and Emotional Control in the Transition to the Twentieth Century.” Michael Barton examines New York Times news stories about disasters between 1852 and 1956 for emotional tone, such as morbid sensationalism or reporters’ sympathy. Mary H. Blewitt explains how different immigrant cultures affected textile workers’ anger at corporate power in 19th century mills. The clash of passionate and progressive emotional styles in Southern white supremacist discourse about defense of sexual honor against blacks in the 1890’s is analyzed by Dolores Janiewski. The origins of the scientific notion that the human body is emotional (and that emotions are embodied) are traced to turn-of-the-century discourse, by Otniel Dror. Contributors to this anthology rely almost exclusively on the cultural residues of emotions: diaries, advice books, news accounts, fiction, biographies. These sources record how people thought about emotions, but are there more direct methods for studying the motivational effects of emotion...