History Of Emotions Research Articles

The Crime of Barrocolorado: A History of Emotions, Anarchism, Medicine, and Crime in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia

AbstractThis article explores contemporary discourses of deviation in early twentieth-century Colombia. Through analysis of a presidential assassination attempt in 1906, known as the Crime of Barrocolorado, it discusses the social construction of notions of criminality and danger in the light of the history of emotions. The assault on the president triggered a series of commentaries and reactions that revolved around anarchism, medicine, and criminology, topics that are dissected and connected here in search of their emotional components. In this way, the study brings forth the importance of emotions in the construction of social and political ideas in the past.

From Devil-Fish to Friendly Whale? Encountering Gray Whales on The California Coast

Eastern North Pacific gray whales are famed for their remarkable ecological history: from near extinction to recovery and from ‘devil-fish’ to ‘friendly whale’. This article critically examines the origins and development of the narrative framing of gray whales’ history as one in which the whales were long known as ‘devil-fish’, until they became ‘friendly whales’ in the 1970s. Drawing on archival sources from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, this article interrupts the premise of a smooth and linear transition from devil-fish to friendly whale. Instead, gray whale histories reveal much more complex and even contradictory human–whale encounters along the California coast. Throughout the time period examined, precursors of the familiar contemporary narrative of gray whale history emerged, each building on prior remembrances of gray whale pasts. More broadly, this article contributes to contemporary conversations in more-than-human historical studies about nonhuman agency, multispecies encounters, memory, and environmental histories of emotion.

Kissinger’s wrath: the reassessment of the US-Israel relationship (March 1975)

This article delves into the often-overlooked emotional aspect of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s decision-making during the 1975 Shuttle Diplomacy, focusing on the US-Israel relationship. While historical records commonly highlight policy nuances and international dynamics, this article illuminates Kissinger’s personal emotions, arguing that these played a pivotal role in his policy decisions. It presents a thorough examination of various records reflecting Kissinger’s interactions with key figures, including Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Gerald Ford. The analysis demonstrates how Kissinger’s emotional responses influenced the intensity of his diplomatic pursuits and reactions to obstacles. This approach not only enhances our understanding of the disengagement agreement negotiations, but also fosters a linkage between diplomatic history and the history of emotions. It propounds that emotions are a crucial aspect of decision-making analysis, both at an institutional and individual level.

Happy Families?: Scottish Presbyterian Missionary Children’s Homes, 1900s–1950s

This article focuses on two residential institutions in Edinburgh – Home House and Cunningham House – established in the first half of the twentieth century by various branches of Scottish Presbyterianism, to cater for the children of their missionaries operating overseas. These homes served to mitigate the common Protestant practice of family separation, whereby children often returned to countries of origin for all or some of their education. These Scottish homes replicated other Protestant institutions for missionary children. At the same time, they were smaller and more intimate in scale, and Presbyterians played on this to accentuate the homes' role in providing a substitute family for the residents. It argues that the Edinburgh homes can be understood from two equally important vantage points, drawing on insights from the history of emotions and the history of childhood. On the one hand, adult narratives played up notions of happiness and domestic stability for the children. On the other hand, children's narratives indicate considerable emotional ambiguity and navigation. As such, Cunningham House and Home House acted as important sites of emotional management perceived and experienced variously by children and adults.

THE STUDY OF PAST EMOTIONS AS A BASIS FOR EMOTIONAL EDUCATION IN MUSIC EDUCATION TODAY

The two main areas of focus in this paper are (a) the intense relationship between music and emotions and (b) the increasing interest in emotions in education and in many fields of social life over recent years. It is suggested that music could be used in music education and in general education in relation to emotional education. This is not a new idea but should be critically rethought in relation to the aims of emotional education as well as reflecting on the main way in which it conceals the social roots and power relations in the experience and expression of emotions. The basis of this consideration is a brief review of the study of the history of emotions so that emphasis is given to the fact that emotions are also a social product. It is the hope that by at least moving into the field of music education and making some proposals, teachers and students will be able to gain more free space to experience and express emotions.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0072/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

‘We Kept Them to Remember’: Tin Trunk Archives and the Emotional History of the Mau Mau War

‘We Kept Them to Remember’: Tin Trunk Archives and the Emotional History of the Mau Mau War

Fearful loyalty: The strategic deployment of emotion by the Cuban proslavery elite, 1830–1850

ABSTRACT This article presents the expression of colonial loyalty in nineteenth century Cuba as a tool mobilised by otherwise disenfranchised enslaving elites seeking to shape the island’s governance. Combined with the judicious expression of fear, this paper suggests that “fearful loyalty” was deployed to influence the Spanish colonial government on the subject of slavery. Contemporary periodicals from the USA, examined here, presented Cuban loyalty as effeminate and baffling. Employing the methodology of History of Emotions to analyse private correspondence between Cuban enslavers, Captain Generals in Cuba, and the metropolitan government in Spain, this study rebuts that outsider impression. Adding depth to our understanding of Atlantic History, this article argues that fearful loyalty was a creolised emotional protocol utilised by enslavers and pro-slave trade individuals when attempting to manipulate the Crown to follow the course of action they considered most advantageous to their interests regarding slavery, censorship, and abolition.

“An Itchin ’Roun the Heart You Can't Get at to Scratch”: Exploring the Emotion of Love in Black Enslaved Communities of the Nineteenth Century

Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized, and have perhaps been taken at face or written value. In some contrast to previous historical scholarship, this article argues that the love, as expressed and experienced within Black enslaved communities, was complex, contentious, and far from monolithic.

Introduction: The Global 1970s from a History of Emotions Perspective

Abstract The 1970s have been identified through a range of emotional markers. This special issue critically analyzes the emotional history of this decade through a global perspective. In doing so, the contributions in this issue consider the different registers and scales at which emotions were experienced, perceived, and discussed. Drawing on discussions of gay liberation struggles in Latin America, decolonial movements in Palestine, the New International Economic Order, the North American Left, and forms of post-imperialist belonging in New Zealand and Australia, we detail how new emotional communities were produced and how distinct emotionalities were shaped in conjunction with shifting global politics.

“Car, car over all, it has taken a terrible hold of us”: Experiencing automobility in interwar Britain and Germany

This article seeks to tell an emotional history of car use through the genre of life-writing, a source whose use in historical mobility research has recently been advocated by Colin Pooley. It focuses on two diarists, Hugh Miller and Victor Klemperer, to uncover what automobility looked and felt like in interwar Britain and Germany, when modern mass motorisation was emerging. It highlights that experiences of automobility were heterogeneous and dependent on social position, combining the excitement and liberty popularly associated with interwar car use with the banal, frustrating and terrifying. Motorists like Miller and Klemperer felt conflicted about automobility and what it represented. Their inner ambivalence points to a unique emotional engagement with the car, which may help to explain its persistence in twentieth-century society and beyond.

Quasi-Development as an Illusion of Personal Growth

This article explores the concept of quasi-development from theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. The study consists of two parts, examining the components and functional manifestations of quasi-development. A theoretical definition of the phenomenon of quasi-development is proposed. In Study 1, the perceptions of quasi-development in two groups of respondents were analyzed by using content analysis: one group consisted of 30 individuals without psychological education and the other of 10 individuals with a psychological background. The study revealed several features of quasi-development, including an attitude towards development where change occurs for the sake of change, an illusion of infinity of options and intensity of development induced by external influence, a desire to obtain a ready-made “recipe” instead of taking responsibility, a lack of correlation between life experience and emotional history, and a lack of a meaning regulator. In Study 2, key components of quasi-development and its connection with magical thinking were assessed by using data from 33 respondents without psychological education, but with experience of seeking psychological help and striving for self-development. The study also explored the correlations of quasi-development markers with the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale proposed by J. Tobacyk. The peculiarities of the social context of modern individuals and the ways of constructing identity were also considered. Finally, the article raises questions about the need for further research on the phenomenon of quasi-development.

National Orphans and a Nation's Trauma: Experience, Emotions, and the Children of the 1916 Easter Rising Martyrs

AbstractThis article begins the work of recovering and understanding children's unique experiences during the Irish Revolution by exploring the history of a diverse group of children and young people bound together by their fathers’ politics during and after the 1916 Easter Rising. In tracing the children of the executed and martyred rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, I seek to challenge and extend the way trauma has been conceptualized and applied by historians of Ireland's revolution, instead arguing that the methodologies of the history of emotions and experience offer more fruitful terrain to explore. In this way, trauma is not an essentializing state of being but instead is navigated, renegotiated, and resurfaced throughout one's life, frequently into old age. Leaning into the inherent uncertainty that writing about children's emotional experiences entails, I read into, across, and against fragmentary and diverse sources to recover the stories of these children who were plunged into national prominence by their fathers’ executions. I also acknowledge my own emotional response to these children's stories and seek to explore the methodological value of this affect in the archive for historians of the Irish Revolution.

Understanding Richard Washburn Child’s Authoritarian Personality: From Theodor Adorno to the Histories of Gender and Emotion

Understanding Richard Washburn Child’s Authoritarian Personality: From Theodor Adorno to the Histories of Gender and Emotion

Moscow as Perceived by Alexander II’s Elder Sons

This article examines the attitude to Moscow of Grand Princes Nicholas Alexandrovich and Alexander Alexandrovich; the latter became Emperor Alexander III afterwards. The opinion has taken root in historiography and become self-evident that the peacemaker tsar loved the ancient capital like no other ruler of the Russian Empire. The article aims to reconstruct the attitude of Alexander III and his elder brother to Moscow and understand why it arose and how it changed over time. The research methodology considers the achievements of the new political history, the history of everyday life, and the history of emotions. The article refers to unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs of contemporaries, the grand princes’ diaries, and their correspondence with Alexander II, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Princes Mikhail Nikolaevich, and Vladimir Alexandrovich, which have not been introduced into scholarly circulation previously. The analysis makes it possible to assert that warm feelings for Mother See did not arise in the tsar-liberator’s eldest sons immediately. The formation of their attitude toward the ancient capital was influenced by professors of Moscow University invited to teach the Grand Princes, such as statistician I. K. Babst, lawyer K. P. Pobedonostsev, and historian S. M. Solovyov. Also, the princes were influenced by the conservative Moscow periodicals they read and Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Unlike the Tsarina, Alexander II was suspicious of the Moscow public, which seemed insufficiently loyal to him. Therefore, his sons’ positive attitude towards Moscow and its society was not something taken for granted. At the same time, attempts to influence the sympathies of the grand princes to the ancient capital pursued the goal not so much to stimulate the tsarevichs’ interest in Moscow antiquities as to make them supporters of “people’s autocracy”, as well as adherents of the “national policy”. In conclusion, the author analyzes the phrase attributed to Alexander III that “Moscow is the temple of Russia, and the Kremlin is its altar” providing arguments about the doubtfulness of its authorship.

The Expression and Evolution of Nationalism in the History of Chinese Spring Festival Gala Dance

As the most representative cultural feast in China, the Spring Festival Gala has carried a lot of nationalist emotions in history. From the expansion of dance to the change and replacement of forms in different periods, as well as the reflection on Cultural identity and National symbol, this paper focuses on the expression and evolution of nationalism in the history of the dance of the Spring Festival Gala in China, aiming to explore the positive role played by the development of the dance of the Spring Festival Gala in the inheritance and development of Chinese national consciousness.

‘Rethinking camaraderie as emotional practices: deindustrialisation and deskilling in South Yorkshire coalfields, 1980s-2000s’

ABSTRACT Historical and sociological scholarship on the British coalfields has been driven by a sustained interest in community and class. Consequently, however, a focus on community can subsume camaraderie/comradeship as a category of historical analysis and its potential value as a framework for understanding change and continuity in practice, experience, and identity. Drawing on methodological tools from the history of emotions, and oral history interviews with ex-miners, this article employs the concept of ‘emotional practices’ to define camaraderie as a learnt, embodied, and affective workplace practice. Arising out of class processes, camaraderie constituted a workplace skill, important in communicating and mobilising ways of feeling and being, which oscillated between integration and alienation, alleviating and aggravating work experiences. It argues men’s lamentations over the loss of camaraderie should be understood as a profound emotional experience of deskilling, affecting how workers navigated and negotiated work and workplace transitions, and communicated with their co-workers and to themselves who they are. By integrating the history of work and the history of emotions into an analysis of camaraderie, it offers a contribution on the lasting effects of deindustrialisation on the body, experience, and identity, and towards a new way of conceptualising camaraderie as ‘emotional practices’.

Objects, Material Culture and the History of Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Objects, Material Culture and the History of Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Litteratursociologi, topologi og digitale metoder

From a general literature sociological point of view that understands literature as source to an investigation of the history of emotions, this article discusses the possibilities offered by digital methods for composing a topology of apathy in Scandinavian literature of Decadence, to investigate the dissemination of the notion in the period.

Peer-to-peer counselling and emotional guidance on infertility in Britain and Belgium (1970s–1980s)

In the wake of sexual and reproductive health counselling in postwar Western Europe, emotional guidance on infertility was as yet neither readily recognised nor available. In this article, we show...

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Laura McCoy (bio) Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.95.) Erin Austin Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as “a currency of power” (3). Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers “what people thought emotions could actually accomplish” (13)—in short, how power operated through emotions in both slavery and Emancipation. From the outset, Dwyer makes clear that the stakes of these affective politics were not even. For enslavers, deviating from emotional norms most commonly risked public scrutiny and potential loss of capital, while enslaved people “risked the whip, the auction block, or even death” (3). While historians of slavery have separately explored affective relations among the slaveholding class or enslaved communities, Dwyer considers affective relations between the two groups. This approach enables her to interrogate how individuals navigated power hierarchies through emotional expression and to convincingly contend that attending to emotions sharpens our understanding of how white southerners perpetuated and Black southerners resisted the politics of white supremacy during the years before and after the Civil War. The first chapter broadly explores how enslavers constructed their emotional lives and social identities through enslaved people and, in turn, how enslaved people could manipulate slave owners’ feelings and relationships to survive and resist enslavement. The second chapter explains how southerners learned the emotional politics of a society organized around slavery. Slaveholding parents actively taught their children how to master their own emotions and those of the people they enslaved. From enslaved adults, trickster tales, and the process of play, enslaved children learned how to mask sadness, read slaveholders’ emotions, and identify emotional allies—all affective strategies that could mean the difference between life and death. Together, these chapters emphasize that the emotional politics of slavery were socially constructed and thus intentionally reinforced or resisted. [End Page 246] The third and fourth chapters consider the rhetorical importance and literal commodification of emotions in a society dominated by market forces. For instance, members of the planter class linked the appearance of contentment to profitability, worrying that “sulky” slaves were poor workers and that crying or lashing out on the auction block depreciated an enslaved person’s value. Because trustworthiness had market value, enslaved people could strategically display honesty and loyalty to gain benefits like greater mobility. These chapters demonstrate how the market values of happiness and trust constrained enslaved people’s freedom of emotional expression while simultaneously providing opportunities for enslavers and enslaved people to negotiate their daily lives and material conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contours and consequences of affective discipline as a means of social control. Enslavers assumed the authority to coerce displays of desired emotions from enslaved people and punish them for expressing an emotion deemed inappropriate or threatening, such as grief or anger. The goal of affective discipline was not just to control enslaved people’s emotional expressions, but also to punish them for how they had made slaveholders feel. The final chapter examines Emancipation as “a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South” (162), in part because the planter class fretted over losing the power to affectively discipline Black people. Formerly enslaved people made clear that they believed being free meant the ability to pursue happiness and freely express emotions that had been restricted in bondage. Members of the planter class felt threatened by this emotional liberation and employed both legal and extralegal tactics to reassert the emotional hierarchies of slavery, especially the authority to control Black people’s emotions. The power of Mastering Emotions rests on Dwyer’s patient and nuanced readings of conflicting perspectives and...