An Emotional History of the United States.

An Emotional History of the United States. Edited by Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998. ix plus 476 pp. $60.00/cloth $22.50/paperback).

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 m ethods for studying the motivational effects of emotion on social action? For example, can historians study emotions by analyzing gestures and facial expression in photographs and film footage dating back over a century?

"Varieties of Emotional Expression and Experience: Ethnicity, Gender, Race, Religion" is the rubric for a third set of papers. Timothy Kelly and Joseph Kelly find that the Catholic Church cultivated a fear of damnation and excommunication as a strategy to frighten Catholics into virtuous behavior. For Pentecostal Christians, however, intense and rapturous happiness was taken as a sign of grace, according to R. Marie Griffith. Gospel quartets and spiritual choirs in African American churches are analyzed in relation to class and race by Kimberly Phillips. In a comparison of Jewish and Irish immigrants' emotions, Hasia Diner examines guilt, shame, and other reactions to assimilation and departure from the old country. These chapters lead this reviewer to ask, what should be the ideal goal of an emotions history? Research may gradually color in a vast grid of social emotions, specified by particular emotion, by emotion component (outward expression, versus private feeling), and by religion, ethnicity, historica l period, gender, class and region. What will we do with all these descriptive studies of emotions in time and place?

"Twentieth-Century Emotional Standards and Emotional Experience: Class and Gender" forms the theme for a fourth group of contributions. Two of the chapters focus on middle-class women. A decreased intensity in women s friendships since 1900 is reported by Linda Rosenzweig, and the emergence of companionate married love is recounted by John Spurlock. David Shumway examines marital advice in the 1920s, detecting a new appreciation of the marriage relationship drawn from romantic images in fiction, courtship, and extra-marital affairs. Kevin White proposes that in contrast to women s intensifying romance, men's love became less passionate when Victorian mystery, spirituality, and sexual restraint were replaced by sexual conquest and dating strategies. Cas Wouters highlights the emotional standards set forth in American etiquette books as serving class mobility aspirations. These studies raise questions for me about the function emotion fulfills in the process of social change. When do historians introduce emoti on as an explanation? Are emotions evoked to account for changes in personal relationships, but not for inventions or new legislation? Historians should re-examine their assumptions about the nature of emotion and the domains of society where emotion is believed to carry little significance.

The fifth section, "Emotion and the Consumer Economy," follows an implicit functionalist model that views emotions as adjusting to economic changes. Susan Matt writes that envy, a rarely studied emotion, was aroused by advertising, consumerism, and mobility at the turn of the century. The meaning of envy shifted from signifying an immoral reluctance to accept one's destiny, to an economic stimulant toward improving one's status. Peter Stearns links consumerism to the increasing emotional use of material objects to alleviate boredom, cope with fears, signify love, and distract from grief. Advertising and child-raising practices promoted this emotional use of commercial products. This section on consumerism, a characteristically American trait, leads me to wonder why this book on emotions is about American history? Is it simply because the discipline is subdivided by nationality or should we look for an "American emotional character" reflecting our country's unique history and culture? Although we are sensitiz ed to gender, ethnic, class, and regional variations in emotion, other powerful factors in mass society may blur such distinctions to shape a common national emotional type. For example, sources ranging from travel guides to cross-cultural research have portrayed Americans as outgoing, loud, readily angered, socially informal, and so forth. Are there major national events that have left their mark in our emotional style and standards: wars, upward mobility, westward expansion, urbanization, the great depression, growth from national isolation to a world power, nativist reactions to immigration, for example? These events are not covered in this volume, but should be studied for their possible effects on characteristic American emotions, such as patriotism, courage in war, status anxiety, inventive curiosity, and ethnic hostility.

The final set of papers addresses "Emotion and Individual Experience in the Twentieth Century." These contributions utilize biographical information for insight into individual emotional change. In a psycho-history of late-life emotionality, W. Andrew Achebaum outlines the emotional connections among biological, developmental, cohort, and historical changes. Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines the perils of emotional struggle among fiction writers coping with depression or melancholy. For this reviewer, these contributions remind us not to over-socialize our conception of emotion. Instead we should ask, when does culture fail to limit any natural, biological facet of emotions? Are there historical episodes when some biological core of emotions was culturally inflexible?

This excellent book helps to define a new scholarly specialty. It will be valuable to researchers from several disciplines and will also be useful for college courses. (On my own campus, it is used for a general education course on emotions in history.) The only significant, and largely unavoidable, flaws I found are the definitional issues about what are emotions for an historian, and the uneven emphasis in the book on intimate, micro-level relationships at the expense of macro-level U.S. trends. The contributors introduce topics rarely examined elsewhere, such as envy, emotions in religion, men's romantic beliefs, and effects of music on emotions. Reference notes throughout the book provide a wealth of sources, annotated in detail, to invite readers new to this topic as well as more experienced scholars. I strongly recommend this book not only to historians but also to emotion scholars in sociology, anthropology, and psychology.