An Emotional History of the United States (review)

The field of the history of emotions began in 1985 with an essay by Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions,” American Historical Review, XC (1985), 813–836. Since then, the field has expanded in line with Stearns and Stearns’ term “emotionology,” which they coined to stand for “the collective emotions of a society,” as differentiated from individual emotional experiences (7).

The current volume, containing no less than twenty-two essays, presents recent research. The essays range from C. Dallett Hemphill’s analysis of emotions in the conduct literature of the revolutionary era to W. Andrew Achenbaum’s discussion of “late-life emotionality” in the modern era. Attention is paid to region, class, and race in essays, for example, about the nineteenth-century textile industry (Mary H. Blewett), and about twentieth-century pentacostal women (R. Marie Griffith). The focus is international in Cas Wouter’s study of twentieth-century etiquette books and emotions in Holland, Britain, Germany, and the United States.

Most of the works are empirical and narrative, although concepts are often borrowed from psychology—an interdisciplinary approach made explicit in the introductory essay by Kenneth J. Gergen. Read individually, many of the essays are nuanced and provocative, such as Jeffrey Steele’s on the pervasiveness of nineteenth-century mourning, both feminized and connected to reform; Otnial Dror’s on turn-of-the-twentieth-century physiologists’ attempts to measure and control emotions; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s on depression in major American writers. Kevin White has broadened his work on men in the early twentieth century to suggest that the new emotionality of that era restrained rather than liberated them.

Other essays, such as David Shumway’s on marital-advice books and John C. Spurlock’s on marital satisfaction for middle-class women in the twentieth century, shed little new light on their subjects. Michael Barton’s study of disaster reporting in the New York Times draws from a narrow research base.

Some of the essays appear to be recycled from previous work, with the subject of emotions simply appended to it. Blewett’s fine essay on the textile industry deals only with the anger expressed in public union behavior, avoiding other emotions, such as fear, which may have mitigated or extended public anger. Moreover, were Griffiths’ pentacostal women ever angry or depressed? Are the official church records she uses necessarily silent on that score?

Nonetheless, this is a rich and broad collection. Since most of the authors appear to have read their companion authors’ work, the essays are often effectively linked together. Stearns and Lewis have written an excellent introduction, in which they survey the state of the field of “emotionology” and suggest its importance for the history of the United States. But emotions are often slippery and evanescent: To capture their content in the final analysis may require the art of a poet as well as that of a historian.