STEPHANIE OLSEN AND ROB BODDICE

Styling Emotions History

Abstract
In this article we analyze the profound impact of Peter Stearns’s pioneering work
on the history of emotions over more than three decades. Stearns has influenced
both the theory and the methodology of emotions historians, as well as providing a
large body of work that empirically documents emotional change over time. In
our assessment of Stearns’s contribution, we emphasize the ongoing political im-
portance and scholarly relevance of this work, particularly as it pertains to the his-
tory of childhood and to current concerns with emotional control in American
society. We assess the lasting significance of Stearns’s tackling of the nature-
nurture debate, the evolution of his concept of “emotionology,” and the over-
whelming importance of Stearns’s assertion that the study of emotions was not
the exclusive domain of scientists but fair game for historians as well.

With some hesitancy we can state that the history of emotions is an established
part of the discipline of history. If we are still somewhat reticent to proclaim this
with confidence, it is in part because the enormous wave of research and publi-
cation in the field that has taken place in the last ten years, and which looks set
to continue in the next ten, still sits on the fringes of mainstream historiograph-
ical practice. Many more people have become historians of the emotions, our-
selves included, but large questions remain as to whether we have convinced
the profession as a whole that what we are doing is worthwhile and important.
If we consider the extent to which we have influenced emotions research be-
yond the discipline of history, those questions loom even larger. In short, time is
still needed for critical reception and refinement.
Doubtless such an appraisal would sound familiar in the ears of Peter
Stearns, who, for more than a decade, plowed a lonely field with few helpers.
Though the idea for a history-of-emotions project is not original to Stearns (we
probably have to give that honor to Lucien Febvre), Stearns wrote the path-
finding books and articles, some (though not all) with Carol Z. Stearns.1 The
influence and importance of these works on emotions is immeasurably greater
today than a decade ago. The large institutions that have been established for
the purpose of expanding and exploring the history of emotions, in Berlin, in
London and across Australia, have all turned to the work of Stearns and Stearns
as one of the few available entry points to a diffuse approach.2 Along with

Journal of Social History vol. 0 no. 0 (2018), pp. 1–12

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2 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein, Peter Stearns is among the “big three”
of the discipline.3 In the following, we propose to review and appraise Stearns’s
contribution to the history of emotions, to demonstrate his active engagement
in the development of different approaches, and to show the extent to which
his ideas continue to inspire research and bear fruit.
Peter and Carol Stearns’s first book within the history of emotions tackled
the issue of anger and the struggle for emotional control in America.4 That
choice positively chimes with ongoing topical relevance, and indeed the pro-
grammatic scheme for this book sets out many of the key issues that continue to
preoccupy history-of-emotions scholars today. The date of the work—1986—is
key to understanding what would come to change in Stearns’s own understand-
ing of the emotions, for while this first book probed at the edges of social con-
structionism, that particular set of ideas had yet to take firm root within the
discipline of history. The Stearnses’ approach to the study of emotions was inev-
itably influenced by work in nonhistorical disciplines that focused on biological
universals. From the beginning, however, they registered circumspection about
the usefulness of thinking in emotional constants when their source material
clearly showed considerable variance over time in the way emotions were
expressed. Stearns and Stearns saw a mediating role for history in the nature/
nurture debates that were still running at a high pitch but perhaps did not fore-
see the extent to which their insights would contribute to a total collapse of
that duality across the humanities and the social neurosciences. Bioculture was
not, at that point, in anybody’s repertoire, but this pioneering work helped
make such thinking possible.
At the beginning of the Stearnses’ history-of-emotions project, there was
little in the historiography, especially in English, to latch on to, beyond the
waning popularity of the short-lived psychohistory experiment that had been
chiefly promoted by Peter Gay.5 The Stearnses rejected the Freudian architec-
ture of psychohistory and, in particular, its presentation of “an essentially static
psyche” that allowed the past to become “a simple illustration of a human real-
ity” that does not change.6 In this sense, psychohistory seemed at odds with the
historian’s main project, namely, charting change over time. While the
Stearnses retained an awareness that continuity and change were always mutu-
ally at stake, the emphasis on emotional change was a key insight from the late
1980s. Without it, there was a risk that emotions history would be, as they put
it, put “out of business.”7 Their second key work in this field was therefore titled
Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory (1988). Stearns soon
dropped the term psychohistory as he looked for the “wider impact of emotional
styles” and attempted to promote an explicit focus on emotions in historical
work, instead of treating them en passant as a minor element of social historical
study.8 Part of this attempt involved the disruption of social history’s rational/ir-
rational dyad, which conflated emotion with a lack of judgment. Stearns argued
that emotions “are not irrational; they relate to the cognitive processes in that
they involve thinking about one’s own impulses and evaluating them as an in-
trinsic part of the emotional experience itself.”9 It was a direct challenge to so-
cial historians, particularly those who studied mass movements, protests, and
crowds, to reappraise their analytical categories.
In insisting that emotions history be central not only to work on the family
but also to histories of work, leisure, community, and the courtroom, the
Styling Emotions History 3

Stearnses set out an ambitious agenda that has since been taken up and is being
rapidly expanded. Focus groups on law and emotions in Berlin are making par-
ticular use of the dramatic setting of the courtroom,10 and the question of work
has been incorporated into broader studies of the relation between emotions
and capitalism. Stearns himself pioneered the centrality of the history of emo-
tions by connecting it with other key interventions in various subfields. In his
contributions to the history of childhood and youth, for example, he was one of
the first scholars to see the advantages of the history of emotions. As with his
other work on emotions, Stearns seeks to chart a history of change regarding
childhood emotion, showing that people gave happiness and fear, in particular,
different significance over time in relation to children and their upbringing.
Most recently, he has turned to the question of obedience in childhood.
Stearns argues that world cultures, until very recently, did not view child-
hood as a particularly happy stage in the lifecycle.11 He finds that happiness be-
came a “central purpose, a leading quality of childhood and an essential
obligation for parents” starting around the mid-1910s.12 Here Stearns points to a
central question for historians of emotions and childhood, one that he sees as a
tension in his sources on childhood happiness: “is the child to be naturally seen
as happy, or was this something that had to be created along those lines [. . .]?”13
In other words, was a change in tack in parental advice manuals brought about
by a changing conception of the child and of that particular stage in the life-
cycle? Can we point to a change in the emotion (in this case, happiness) and/or
to how or by whom this emotion was felt? In any case, for Stearns “the new goal
was clear: happiness and childhood were to unite.”14
Though most of his work in the history of emotions has focused on the
United States, Stearns has occasionally taken a broader approach, using a
“Western” or even a global perspective. With Timothy Haggerty, he examined
the role of fear in childhood, stressing larger “Western” trends in which
“nineteenth-century confidence yielded to twentieth-century Angst.”15 Other
scholars, however, have pointed out that this “Western” trend was by no means
universal even in the “West,” questioning the extent to which US material can
be used to draw conclusions about larger trends related to children and to child-
rearing.16 Further questions remain about how far Stearns’s contributions to the
history of emotions can be applied globally, but his work on childhood gestures
in that direction.17 While Stearns acknowledges that the tying together of child-
hood with happiness is a distinctly American model, he argues for the view that
there was a “globalization of happiness” beyond the US, suggesting parallels in
Latin America, China, and Japan, especially related to a highly developed child-
ren’s consumer culture.18
As with fear and happiness, his goal in examining obedience was to look at
children’s emotions specifically “or at least adult expectations about children’s
emotions.”19 Roughly until 1900, assuaging children’s fears was less important
for parents than instilling obedience.20 Later, the emphasis on mastering fear as
part of a developing moral character diminished, replaced increasingly by a be-
lief in the need to avoid fear altogether. Historians of childhood emotions are
starting to take up Stearns’s challenge. Is there anything specific about this (or
any other) stage of the lifecycle in terms of both emotional expectations and ex-
perience?21 And if so, how do we access children’s changing emotional experi-
ences? Much of Stearns’s work on childhood emotions is focused on evidence
4 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

from advice manuals. As with every source, advice manuals are limited in what
they can tell us. They can give us a good picture of changing prescriptions and
proscriptions related to childhood but very little about children’s lived emo-
tional experience and how that changed over time. Stearns’s recent adoption of
a quantitative, in addition to a qualitative, approach does not surmount this
limitation.22 Stearns was right to point to the particular problems of studying
children and childhood and to a lack of child-produced or child-driven sources
in particular, but historians of children and youth are finding ways either to lo-
cate such sources or to read between the lines of adult-generated sources to good
effect.23 With all of his work on childhood emotions, Stearns is quick to point
out that emotional change was not absolute: older trends co-existed with newer
ones, however much they diminished in importance over time. But the emo-
tions are central to an understanding of historical change per se: changes in
emotional prescription were “part of a larger set of redefinitions” and a larger set
of social-historical trends in the twentieth-century United States, including
changes in educational and economic norms, the change of relationships be-
tween parents and children, and the rise of mass consumerism. Crucially though,
the turn toward the coupling of childhood and happiness was not an entirely
“positive” trend. The need for children to be happy put pressure on parents, edu-
cators, and other adults to provide the children in their midst with the material
and emotional conditions required. Stearns argues that it also put strains on
children themselves to be happy and increased the likelihood that those who
felt sad experienced guilt or depression.
The consequences of emotional control have run through Stearns’ works on
emotions like a red thread. In 1994’s American Cool, the focus was on
“restraint.” It began with the illuminating insight that, through the word “cool,”
Americans had collapsed the distance between emotional control and being
good: “Cool has become an emotional mantle, sheltering the whole personality
from embarrassing excess.”24 In a book that argued for the emergence and con-
solidation of an emotionology in which “intensity might be dangerous,” we find
a remarkably prescient picture of the current fracturing of American society
along lines that correlate class, race, gender, or age with anger and the politics
of its expression.25 One can only hope that Stearns is working on a new book.
At the core of Stearns’s multiple projects, therefore, is an emphasis on the
ways in which styles of emotional control changed, with a particular focus on
the twentieth-century advent of new levels and forms of emotional control that
added new layers of anxiety, stress, and denial onto attempts to suppress anger,
fear, or jealousy. In turn, these styles had not only experiential impacts but also
social impacts because they helped delimit the boundaries of acceptable
behavior in certain settings. As the emotional repertoire becomes prescriptively
narrower, so the ground of moral judgments and social and familial relations
shifts. In short, Stearns pointed the way for the visualization of emotional com-
munities by demonstrating how emotional prescription drew boundaries around
types of behavior in certain types of setting. The word “community” and the
role of emotions in community relations, mentioned explicitly by Stearns and
Stearns in 1988, prefigured Barbara Rosenwein’s key contribution of the
“emotional community” as a major category of analysis in emotions history
research.26
Styling Emotions History 5

As the Stearnses mentioned at the beginning of Anger, psychological and

biological approaches are “not conducive to a grasp of changes in the cultural
valuation or actual use of anger and, unfortunately [have] not even answered
the nagging question of whether anger is somehow a fixed quantity—if not in
each individual, at least in each large grouping of individuals—so that we can
count on anger’s flaring up in certain situations and concern ourselves merely
with variations in the manner of its expression.”27 Their response to this chal-
lenge, premised on a “link between the biological and the social, a recognition
of both ingredients insofar as social standards will play a major role in guiding
the cognitive element of emotion,” has proven hugely influential for scholars
who wish to chart the history of the body and the mind in the world.28 This
effort has been particularly fruitful in American history, with major studies
appearing in recent years that have refined Stearns’s methodology (particularly
in the expansion of source material) and periodization while acknowledging
that such research has only been made possible from the platform he helped
construct.29 From the first, Stearns and Stearns were putting the body in the
world, with its infinitely variable and ever-changing forms and prescriptions for
emotional expression and hinting at the impact this must necessarily have on
human biology. They were uncommonly aware of, and prescient about, the dy-
namic processes involved in emoting that have come to lie at the center of
history-of-emotions work. They drew inspiration from the sociologist Arlie
Russel Hochschild’s work on “feeling rules” in order to introduce their most fam-
ous neologism, “emotionology,” which concerned an individual’s “effort to grap-
ple with conflicts between social demands and feeling.”30 In other words,
“emotionology” delimited the repertoire of emotional expression available to a
person, into which their feelings were made to fit. This they otherwise termed
“emotional style,” which continues to be a successful approach in understanding
how societies were characterized by their emotional repertoires.31
The Stearnses had launched the concept of emotionology in a path-
breaking article in the American Historical Review in 1985, which many consider
to be the founding document for the history of emotions as it is currently
practiced.32 But this initial framework for bringing the emotions under the pur-
view of historians was limited to the study of emotional expression. Emotions
themselves were bracketed in favor of a focus on the ways in which social
“agencies and institutions either promote or prohibit certain kinds of emotions,
while remaining neutral or indifferent to others.”33 Indeed, the whole point of
introducing the new term “emotionology” was to help historians avoid appearing
to make claims about emotions themselves, when actually they were only talk-
ing about the circumscription of expression. Nevertheless, even in 1985 the
Stearnses were openly aware that emotions themselves were subject to change
over time and that there were possibilities at hand for studying the relationship
between emotional standards and emotional experiences.34
Those possibilities prompt us to connect “emotionology” with another in-
fluential innovation, William Reddy’s “emotives.”35 Stearns and Stearns wrote
that “emotionology, by shaping articulate expectations, does influence actual
emotional experience.”36 Reddy’s innovation, in our interpretation of it, is not
to distinguish between emotionology and emotion but to mutually implicate
each in the other at the level of experience. This is the “emotive.” In that sense,
Reddy might talk about emotionology in the abstract, as a set of feeling rules for
6 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

society, but never of an emotional experience devoid of the emotionological

ground in which it takes place. This is the essential untethering of the history of
emotions from a biological constant that would limit, fundamentally, what an
emotional experience could be like. Stearns and Stearns in many ways did the
preparatory work for this development, allowing at first for a sense of antagonism
between the psychological sciences and history and later for a rapprochement
according to revised neurological understandings of what emotions are and how
they are formed and experienced. The Stearnses’ early work largely bracketed
biology because they accepted the premise that human biology “has not changed
significantly in our brief time span,” which was mainly focused on the nine-
teenth century.37 They were content, at the beginning, to label anger “one of
the basic emotions.”38
Historians of emotion in general, ourselves included, would now say that
these things no longer hold true.39 As work on neuroplasticity and microevolu-
tion, as well as new findings in epigenetics, point to biological changes that take
place over the course of a single life and between generations, the historian’s
quest to study change over time, even in an arena that might at first appear to
be intrinsically biologically grounded, is more alive with possibilities than
ever.40 Indeed, the Stearnses were quick to elaborate their concept of emotio-
nology and extend it. Emotionology, they said, “affects behavior as well as judg-
ment, and enters into the cognition by which individuals evaluate their
emotional experience. In this sense, by producing affect about emotion—
judgment, for example, that fear is pleasurable (as on a scary amusement ride) or
objectionable—it enters into emotional experience directly.”41 Although they
still clung to something biologically constant, a tension was abundantly clear
even by 1988.
Since there is no context devoid of an emotionology, the relevance of
something “basic” in the background seems dubious. If emotionology affects
how an emotion is experienced, and there is always an emotionology (or an op-
positional reaction to one), then it stands to reason that emotions considered as
meaningful “events” are always contextual. Even if there is a basic biological
backdrop that delimits the range of what can happen, the meaning of emotions
is theoretically infinite and tied to circumstance. This insight was re-iterated in
Peter Stearns’s 1989 volume, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American
History.42 Even though there is still a reference here to “basic emotions,” jeal-
ousy was such a complex “amalgam” of them, “open to various socially deter-
mined combinations,” that the basic-emotion background was of limited
explanatory use.43 It could therefore be discarded in favor of a genuine study of
emotions in context. Stearns was explicit: “Some researchers may find jealousy
essentially a constant, not worth folding into a serious study of cultural diversity
in emotion or change over time; this view, we will hope to show, is wrong, but
it may be pervasive.”44 And again: “For jealousy, though it seems to have animal
roots at least in male reactions designed to defend territoriality and sexual ac-
cess, is in humans a supremely social emotion. It is capable of varied definitions
depending on cultural context.”45 This makes the use of the word “evolution”
in the title of Stearns’ book a particularly pointed, if not barbed, one, for the
work directly appropriated the study of jealousy from biologists and essentializing
psychologists and put it firmly in the hands of humanities scholars and of histori-
ans in particular.
Styling Emotions History 7

The uncoupling from biological determinants was therefore a process that

had already begun in the 1980s but which would have a distance to travel before
the history of emotions was liberated from the universalist assumptions and cate-
gories of some psychologists. What is perhaps most surprising about the journey
that historiography has had to take is that such an uncoupling was prescribed at
the beginning of the history of emotions by Febvre. The domination of emotion
studies by “hard” sciences meant that call fell flat for at least one generation
and, probably, two. Indeed, Stearns and Stearns were among the first to point
out to historians that there was an emerging debate between universalists and
social constructionists, asking historians to consider the controversy and chal-
lenging them to be more than “simpleminded empiricists,” playing inferiors to
“more sophisticated colleagues in other disciplines.”46 This call has been well
and truly met and not least by Stearns himself. While in American Cool, pub-
lished in 1994, he could see no “definitive resolution” to the debate between
universalists and constructionists, he nevertheless continued to emphasize how
“cultural standards” changed the ways in which emotions were experienced,
pointing again to a seismic shift in emotionology in America in the 1920s.47
And through the lens of obedience, Stearns’ most recent work in the history of
childhood emotions reveals complex developments in children’s “emotional
socialization.”48 Such studies encourage historians to consider concepts with
emotional valence far beyond narrow classifications of basic emotions. As
Stearns points out, “emotional alignment” was certainly necessary for obedience
to be effective.49
Already by 1998 and the publication of An Emotional History of the United
States, the volume Stearns co-edited with Jan Lewis, the pitch had changed sig-
nificantly, not only with respect to something resembling a resolution to the
emotions debate, leaning heavily toward an openness to social construction, but
also with a much more penetrating scope for the history of emotions.50 The pro-
ject now aimed “to recover that living presence, to recapture the way history
felt.”51 Methodologically, there is little overlap with Lynn Hunt’s attempt, in
2009, to do the same thing and capture the “experience of revolution,” but the
statement of intent was profoundly important.52 Lewis and Stearns further
refined and expanded the concept of “emotionology”:
the distinction between precept and experience should not be drawn too
sharply, for the two are always held in tension; the one is tested against the
other, and each is understood only in the context of the other. Historians of
the emotions remind us that men and women give shape to their own lives,
sometimes attempting to conform to the prevailing standards [emotionology],
sometimes internalizing them, sometimes resisting, but always negotiating be-
tween experience and precept, in the process giving history its distinctive,
human contours.53

This is much closer to what William Reddy defined as an “emotive,” which

formed the platform for his book that followed soon after, The Navigation of
Feeling.54 It allowed Stearns formally to posit emotions as both a cause and an
effect of history, putting the subject matter at the heart of what historians do.
The impact of these innovations crossed disciplinary boundaries, however,
for Stearns was never only interested in what emotions were like in the past. His
explanatory force always tended toward a contemporary understanding of the
8 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

emotionology of the American present. On a number of occasions, he pointed

to the possibilities of reaching far back as well as forward to the present,
acknowledging the continually changing nature of emotions. Emotions history is
“an ongoing process, at least in modern history, and not a handful of once-and-
for-almost-all transformations.”55 Historians of emotion could now aim to
understand “how emotions actually operate in real human contexts.”56
That was the impetus behind American Fear in 2006, which was written in
the wake of 9/11 and which took square aim at the ways in which certain polit-
ical factions—the Republican right and the religious right, often (but not al-
ways) the same people—appropriated the instrument of terrorism and used mass
fear in their own political self-interest.57 “Terrorism is, after all, an alternative to
conventional warfare mainly in its effort to provoke fear instead of mustering
proportionate force. Fighting terrorism involves, perforce, the best possible grasp
of fear.”58 Behind this lies a more than slight suspicion that certain politicians
understand fear, and how to use it, all too well already. The other major attempt
here, therefore, is to cast light on the instrumentalization of American fear in
the absence of a tangible threat. While stressing a more central contemporary
and political role for historians in public debate, American Fear did also soften
the line about getting to the heart of a “living presence” of emotion. While
Stearns’s position on the nature/nurture debate still clearly placed him in the
camp of cultural relativism, he seemed to be sidestepping a full engagement with
the issue. His “main argument” was “not that actual fear has changed . . . but ra-
ther that its public context has altered.”59 This begs the question as to what
“actual fear” could be. How could one get at it in a context-free, neutral way?
Similar questions stalk his work on children and childhood emotions, since
“Emotional change in childhood” Stearns suggests, “must always be suggested
cautiously, given inherently inadequate direct evidence and the need to ac-
knowledge some innate emotional reactions independent of cultural context.”60
All of Stearns’s work in this field would lead us to the understanding that a
changing context of emotion must necessarily amount to a changing experience
of emotion, that however physiologically circumscribed the occurrence of an
emotion might be, what elicits it and what it feels like are always and irrevoc-
ably bound with its context, its emotionology. Imagining a human of any age in
a context “independent of cultural context” remains something of a metaphys-
ical enigma.
Although it is difficult to find a reason for these inconsistencies, in the final
analysis they are not so consequential. The tension surrounding something
“basic,” about some fundamental emotional stuff lurking in the background of
the fixed human being, sits uncomfortably in most of Stearns’s work on the
emotions, and yet, and this is crucial, his arguments do not at all depend on this
fixed thing but in fact serve to undermine it. In every case, we are turned to the
social context of emotion and to emotions’ cultural construction. Stearns does
not need to enter into a deep study of what emotions actually are because his
empirical accounts emphatically demonstrate that emotions—at the level of
meaning and experience—change over time. What they are is historical. The na-
ture/nurture debate, or the problem with hardwiring, seems now only to be a dis-
traction in these works. The debate has moved on.
On that score, Stearns’ observations about putting history at the center of
emotions research now seem more important than ever, though it would be
Styling Emotions History 9

reasonable to say that until recently the traction that historians of emotion have
had with the emotions research of other disciplines has been slight. But increas-
ingly, as many disciplines orientate themselves toward neuroscientific questions,
historians have a great deal to offer in showing the real world causes and effects
of neurochemical changes and particular expressions of neuroplasticity and syn-
aptic development. To be clear, historians are not mapping the brains of the
dead but extrapolating from neuroscientific research that they have the capacity
to confirm and demonstrate the contextual quality of human experience.61
When Stearns wrote of the potential of the history of emotions to challenge the
“basic emotions” model of psychological essentialists, he could not have then
known the extent to which the neurosciences would themselves turn to the so-
cial, just as social sciences turned to them.62 A middle way, rejecting the binary
of biology and social construction in favor of a biocultural understanding, now
seems to offer a united vision among historians and neuroscientists.63 The na-
ture/nurture debate has been supplanted by bioculture.
The full implications of this vision, in a to-be-hoped-for united effort of
qualitative research, remain to be seen. Nevertheless, we can forecast a bright fu-
ture for the history of emotions, not only at the center of the discipline of histo-
ry but as a significant influence, if not a compass, for emotions research in
general. It is doubtful that we should be in this position without the tenacity
and productivity of Peter Stearns in inspiring this loose collective of historians
around the world.

Endnotes
Dr Stephanie Olsen, Dept. of History, McGill University and Dr Rob Boddice, Dept. of
History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universitaet Berlin.
1. Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective
d’autrefois?,” Annales d’histoire sociale 3, No. 1/2 (Jan.—Jun., 1941): 5–20; Lucien Febvre,
“Une vue d’ensemble: Histoire et psychologie” [1938], Combats pour l’Histoire (1952;
Paris: Armand Colin, 1992).
2. In Berlin, the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human
Development; in London, the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary
University of London; in Australia, the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions.
3. See the revealing interview by Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview
with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49
(2010): 237–65.
4. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in
America’s History (Chicago, 1986).
5. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford, 1985); Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience:
Victoria to Freud, 5 vols (Oxford, 1984–1998).
6. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New
Psychohistory (New York, 1988), 3.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Ibid., 2.
10 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

9. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style

(New York and London, 1994), 14.
10. Significant contributions to this project were recently featured in this journal. See
Journal of Social History 51, no. 3 (Spring 2018).
11. Peter N. Stearns, “Defining Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change,” The
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3 (2010): 165–86, at 168.
12. Ibid., 172.
13. Ibid., 172.
14. Ibid., 173.
15. Peter N. Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, “The Role of Fear: Transitions in Emotional
Standards for Children, 1850–1950,” The American Historical Review 96 (1991), 63–94,
at 64.
16. Nelleke Bakker, “The Meaning of Fear. Emotional Standards for Children in the
Netherlands, 1850–1950: Was There a Western Transformation?” Journal of Social History
34 (2000): 369–91.
17. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New
York, 2003); Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History, second edition (Abingdon,
2011); Peter N. Stearns, “Obedience and Emotion: A Challenge in the Emotional
History of Childhood,” Journal of Social History 47 (2014): 593–611; Stearns and
Haggerty, “The Role of Fear”; Stearns, “Defining Happy Childhoods.”
18. Stearns, “Defining Happy Childhoods,” 182.
19. Stearns, “Obedience,” 594.
20. Stearns and Haggerty, “The Role of Fear,” 66.
21. See, for example, Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen,
“Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood,” Childhood, Youth and Emotions in
Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen
(Houndmills, 2015), and Ute Frevert, et al, Learning how to Feel: Children’s Literature and
Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970 (Oxford, 2014).
22. In addition to advice manuals, in “Obedience,” Stearns uses the American English
and British English corpora of the Google project (on the Brigham Young University
website) to examine the number and relative frequency of references to “obedience” and
related terms.
23. See the recent Childhood, Youth and Emotions collection for several innovative ways of
seeking children’s emotional experiences, many using Stearns’ work as a springboard.
24. Ibid., 1.
25. Ibid., 290.
26. The idea was coined in “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical
Review 107 (2002): 821–45. It received its full expression in Emotional Communities in the
Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006).
27. Stearns and Stearns, Anger, 5.
28. Ibid., 5.
Styling Emotions History 11

29. Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotions, Power, and the Coming of the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2008); Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History
(Oxford, 2011).
30. Stearns and Stearns, Anger, 14.
31. See, for example, Benno Gammerl, ed., “Emotional Styles—concepts and challenges,”
special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16 (2012).
32. Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of
Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–36.
33. Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology,” 813.
34. Ibid., 825–26.
35. First coined in William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical
Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327–51 at 331.
36. Stearns and Stearns, Anger, 15.
37. Ibid., 15.
38. Ibid., 17.
39. See Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions,” Psychology and
History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford (Cambridge,
2014), 150–53; Vallgårda, Alexander, and Olsen, “Emotions and the Global Politics of
Childhood,” 20–26.
40. See, for example, Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2008).
41. Stearns and Stearns, Emotion and Social Change, 7.
42. Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New
York, 1989).
43. Stearns, Jealousy, xi–xii.
44. Ibid., 3.
45. Ibid., 5.
46. Stearns and Stearns, Emotions and Social Change, 10.
47. Stearns, American Cool, 3.
48. Stearns, “Obedience,” 593.
49. Ibid., 594.
50. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New
York, 1998).
51. Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction,” Emotional History, 1.
52. Lynn Hunt, “The Experience of Revolution,” French Historical Studies 32 (2009):
671–78.
53. Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction,” Emotional History, 5.
54. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, 2001).
55. Stearns and Stearns, Jealousy, 8.
12 Journal of Social History Spring 2018

56. Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction,” Emotional History, 7.

57. Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (New
York, 2006).
58. Ibid., 12.
59. Ibid., 13.
60. Stearns and Haggerty, “The Role of Fear,” 79.
61. Rob Boddice and Daniel Lord Smail, “Neurohistory,” Debating New Approaches to
History, eds. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (London, forthcoming).
62. He is clearly aware of the new possibilities. See Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns,
“Afterword,” Doing Emotions History, eds. Susan J. Matt and Peter Stearns (Urbana
Champaign, 2014), 206.
63. Larry S. McGrath, “History, Affect, and the Neurosciences,” History of Psychology
(2016).