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."

As Barton points out, this kind of blatantly emotional reporting gave way over time to detailed yet detached body counts, references to previous record accidents, and more focus on the fortunate survivors than the unfortunate victims. Our late-twentieth-century exposure to death and destruction via global satellite news provides such "detached detail" to an extreme degree; here, image and information are separated from their emotional grounding in ways that would have been unimaginable to Americans a century ago.

Kevin White's analysis of early twentieth-century etiquette books, marriage manuals, and romance magazines reveals a seldom acknowledged emotional cost of sexual liberation. He finds that rapid changes in understandings of gender and sexuality ushered in a new model for American men:

a fantasy world created by popular culture encouraged a retreat from the deep emotional intensities of committed love and an encouragement of brief, shallow, sex-based relationships. … By provoking this informalization, popular culture encouraged a profound erosion of private life and spread its own subtle controls that further limited emotional expression.

In White's view, the modern American model of sexuality might have been initially liberating but quickly trapped the "New Man" (and, one suspects, the "New Woman") in patterns of social relations that were just as controlling, in their own way, as Victorian mores. The relatively quick rise of modern dating with its new rules—"have fun"—and ritual sites—the dance hall, the movie house, and the automobile—caught men unprepared to do much more than stumble into this new sexual frontier.

Taken together, Barton and White's contributions ask us to revise radically our thinking about the progress of emotional life in America over the past 150 years. The received view of the modern liberation of emotions from Victorian restraint is shown to be inadequate as both Barton and White stress the highly regulated and ritualized nature of modern American emotional experience. In their introduction, Lewis and Stearns remark that the transitions between the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the nineteenth and twentieth stand out as times of change for American emotions. One wonders if we are in the midst of another such period of change when American emotional life will again be reconfigured.

The cover of Inventing the Psychological reproduces a piece by Barbara Kruger: a violent, fragmented image of a woman's face framed by a disarrayed typeface text that proclaims, "You are not yourself." That image sets the tone for the volume edited by cultural historians Pfister and Schnog. Their approach, in contrast to Stearns and Lewis's, is to view the history of the emotions in America as primarily a story of ideologically rooted attempts to control and prescribe emotional experience and expression. While such a perspective is not altogether missing in Stearns and Lewis, it is the governing principle of Inventing the Psychological.

Perhaps the strongest essay here is an influential piece by historian John Demos, first published in 1978, in which he argues that the success of psychoanalysis in America was due in part to the "patricidal cult of success" endemic to industrial-capitalist culture; in other words, the early twentieth-century "hothouse families" of the middle class provided the "cultural and psychological ground in which Freudian ideas would subsequently take root."

As cultural historians are apt to do, the contributors place American emotions under the glaring eye of hermeneutical suspicion. The result is a rather paranoid narrative according to which psychology—both academic and popular—creates, instantiates, and then controls how we all feel. Perhaps because of this approach, the contributions to Inventing the Psychological more often than not fail to provide the lasting lessons about American emotional life that are to be found in their model Demos or in the social historians of Stearns and Lewis's collection. Their attempts to elucidate the changing role of emotion in specific examples of American literature (Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer), art (Thomas Eakins's portraiture), and music (jazz criticism) tend to provide only partial glimpses of ourselves that are in the long run unsatisfying.

One notable exception is historian of American psychology Jill Morawski's more focused, less ideological portrait of the strange presentation of the "science of emotions" in college textbooks widely used in the first half of the twentieth century. Trying to cater at once to scientific authority and to the perceived needs of students, these texts offered a contradictory self-presentation of psychology that promoted both a "determinist, biomechanical model of emotional expression and a self-gratifying, masterful, and profitably desirous one." With this in mind, it becomes a bit more clear how confused the educated public is about its own emotions and perhaps why.

A handful of other essays—Catherine Lutz's on the emotional fallout of the Cold War, for example, and Franny Nudleman's on emotional self-disclosure on The Oprah Winfrey Show—suggest, along with Demos and Morawski, the insights to be gained from this kind of cultural history when it is not ideologically pinched.

Taken together, these volumes make a strong argument for the historical, social embeddedness of human emotions. They may also leave the reader quite bewildered. In the hands of social historians, we are left feeling nostalgic enough to draw near to the emotional life of America over the past two centuries so as to wash ourselves in the joy, anger, and melancholy of ordinary people living within our democracy. At the same time, in the hands of cultural historians we are repulsed at the apparently coercive nature of American emotional life, seeing the traps it places in our paths to self-understanding.

Living in a post-Christian age, many Christians struggle too with the ambivalence of their feelings about American culture. It's common to hear believers of all stripes wax nostalgic for simpler times while in the same breath condemning the very attitudes and institutions nurtured by such times. For example, many wish to return to a time and place where neighbors and friends take care of (rather than ignore, harass, or bring suit against) one another—but it was just those sorts of times in which Americans looked toward institutions like public schools and government agencies to expand our ability to make sure all were cared for. Similarly, we are quick to raise the flag of our guarantee of rights under the Constitution to speech, assembly, and religious practice, yet we bemoan how we have become a society so rampantly individualistic, splintered, and self-serving.

In trying to make sense of these kinds of issues, it is important to remember several of the broad lessons taught by these two volumes. First, sociohistorical context is fundamentally important for understanding our own emotions and those of others. As such, the contextual nature of emotions challenges their assumed private and static nature. Rather than fixed entities, what we call our emotions are fluid, dynamic concepts we continually employ to make sense of experience. But both An Emotional History of the United States and Inventing the Psychological also teach us that our emotions are "ours"—identifying them as both individually embodied and socially shared.

Second, emotions play a central and often unacknowledged role in modern American culture. Ours is largely a history told of important people doing important things, and when the story does take an "inner turn," perhaps we talk about ideas—freedom, progress, unity, division—that fueled and were created in that historical "doing." But if we have learned our first lesson, we just may have to acknowledge the nonrational dimension of our past, and presumably our present and future, too.

Trey Buchanan is assistant professor of psychology at Wheaton College.

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