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Two major university presses have recently published books that attempt to locate our understanding of human emotions in what many might consider a novel place: American history. Ours is a society that regards emotions as inner psychological entities shared by humans across time and place. Hearing Hamlet brood, recounting the passion of Christ on Good Friday, or watching the proceedings of the House Judiciary Committee on C-SPAN provokes feelings that we regard as universal. Although we may not individually experience the same emotions while following the debate over presidential impeachment, say, we typically regard emotional states as basic, shared constructs of the human psyche. Further, we regard feelings as rather historically static and culturally similar.
But how universal are emotions? Anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists have for some time been amassing evidence that argues for both the universality of emotion (e.g., Carol Izard's updating of Charles Darwin's work on the recognition of facial expression of basic emotions) and its cultural construction (e.g., the field work of Catherine Lutz among the Ifaluk of Micronesia). Inventing the Psychological and An Emotional History of the United States enter into this ongoing discussion by viewing emotions through the filter of history, "seconding" our emotions behind yet another set of disciplinary methods.
While both of these books explore the history of emotions with a specifically American focus, their approaches to the subject differ significantly. An Emotional History of the United States, edited by social historians Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, portrays emotion within the interwoven nature of American life where gender, religious morality, economic forces, and popular culture come together to create an ever-shifting ground for the experience, understanding, and expression of "feelings." Erin Krik New's cover art for the book—a close-up, filtered image of a faded, hand-woven American flag—is emblematic of the detail and almost nostalgic warmth with which the contributors approach their subjects. Stearns and Lewis have gathered a rich collection of essays that bring the reader face to face with swatches of the emotional fabric of everyday American life across two centuries. For them, emotions are the "living presence" of history that perhaps can be recaptured amidst the standard narratives of American history.
Acknowledging this to be a precarious task, the contributors immerse themselves in a wide variety of sources: post-Revolutionary diaries and personal correspondence, nineteenth-century etiquette primers, turn-of-the-century tabloid newspapers, advice columns and marriage guides, and twentieth-century gospel hymnody and child-rearing manuals. Although the authors stress particular relational contexts in the private and public expressions of emotion over two centuries of American society, they also show how the watershed events of our history—such as establishing the republic, the upheaval of the Civil War, expanding industrialization, the rise of material and media consumption, and sexual liberation—produced new forms of emotional control and expression.
Two especially insightful pieces begin to suggest the dimensions of this "history of emotion." The first is Michael Barton's analysis of the emotional tenor of newspaper reporting of human tragedies from the 1850s to the 1950s. Reporting on the human devastation of floods, marine and rail accidents, and state executions—what Barton refers to as "journalistic gore"—provided a space for the public expression of a wide range of difficult emotions. Documenting a historical shift in the expression of emotion that seems to follow the curve Peter Stearns has tracked from "Victorian 'passion' … to a modern 'cool' style," Barton finds an evolution "toward more information than story, more sobriety than empathy, more discretion than gore." For example, he notes the lack of emotional distance in much nineteenth-century reporting. A reporter's description of an 1854 rail accident outside Baltimore is typical: "Awful catastrophe. Horrible accident. … The scene was most dreadful. … The rear car passing entirely through the foremost one, and both being filled with passengers, the destruction of life and limb was almost unprecedented. … Among the dead was Mrs. Roberson, a young and beautiful woman. … In removing the cars Mrs. Roberson's body was literally torn to pieces."
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