Book Review

Methods/Theory

Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis introduce this volume with a question: "Do emotions have a history?" Their answer is a simple, and resounding, "Of course" (p. 1). That two-word sentence is the last simple answer the editors provide, for this collection of essays is, above all else, an investigation of the current state of the field of the history of emotion. In their lucid introduction, editors Stearns and Lewis offer a concise history of the field and a frank and thoughtful discussion of the methodological problems and possibilities historians face in studying the "shifting sands" (p. 12) of human emotion.	1
Historians' reluctance to include emotion as a factor in their analyses, Stearns and Lewis argue, is rooted in the history of the profession itself. From the era of disciplinary formation in the late nineteenth century until quite recently, the historical profession claimed the mantle of objectivity and rationality. Historians' dominant understanding of the nature of knowledge and how knowledge is best acquired worked to create a related set of assumptions about the nature of human behavior. Historians constructed their histories through the lens of rationality, thus choosing topics and methods that generally reproduced their assumptions that "the past is more or less knowable in rational terms" (p. 1).	2
In contrast, Stearns and Lewis argue here that (irrational) emotions have played a critical role in human history. It is not simply—though this is an important point—that history was "felt," that men and women in the past experienced their lives in and through emotions. Emotion also had a causal role in history, as people acting upon their feelings helped to bring about a wide variety of interpersonal and institutional changes in American life.	3
Emotion, of course, is an elusive object of study. Direct and unambiguous evidence is rare; even private letters and diaries are not unmediated and transparent reflections of emotional "reality." Love and anger may have felt different to people in the past, or may have been defined or experienced differently by different groups. The words "jealousy" or "sorrow" may not refer to a stable set of feelings over decades or centuries of otherwise dramatic changes in human culture and social organization. That is the point: emotions have a history. This understanding presents critical limitations to the study of emotion, yet when it comes to the transparency and transferability of historical evidence, few fields of inquiry are immune from such limits. In the case of the history of emotions, at least, such questions are foundational; the self-consciousness with which most of the essays in this volume approach them can serve as an example for practitioners in other fields.	4
The book is big, sprawling, and ambitious. Stearns and Lewis have collected twenty-two essays that range in time from the American Revolution to the mid-twentieth century; in subject from politics to romance to consumption; and in method from fairly traditional social history to discursive analysis, psychologically informed argument, and medical science. Although the editors posit a general outline of emotional transformations in American history, the essays' attention to factors of gender, race and ethnicity, religion, class, and other specificities of historical positioning prevent the creation of totalizing narratives.	. . .