Fear and contemporary history: A review essay

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Stearns, Peter N ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846399444     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0033     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. In interest of full disclosure, I also have a book on fear about to appear - American Fear: the causes and consequences of high anxiety - where I try to deal with some, though not all, of the issues raised in this essay.
2. The main studies are Jean Delumeau, Péché et la peur: la cuplabitisation en Occident entre XIIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1983) - translated as Sin and Fear (New York, 1991);
3. and Peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIle siècles: une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978).
4. Timothy Kelly and Joseph Kelly, "American Catholics and the Discourse of Fear," in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998), 259-82.
5. G.T.W. Patrick, "The New Optimism," Popular Science Monthly 82 (May, 1913): 492-503;
6. see also Basil King, The Conquest of Fear (New York, 1921).
7. Cited in James Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death (Philadelphia, 1980), who properly notes the link between this new attack on fear and the belief that death could be relegated to old age.
8. Judith Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago, 1998).
9. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York, 2004).
10. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York, 1999).
11. Frank Füredi, Culture of Fear: risk-taking and the morality of low expectations (rev. ed., London, 2002).
12. Joanna Bourke, Fear: a cultural history (Emeryville, CA, 2006).
13. Christophe Lambert, La Société de la peur (Paris, 2005).
14. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: a genealogy of panic disorder (Durham, NC, 2006).
15. Edward Shorter, "Paralysis: the rise and fall of a 'hysterical' symptom," in P. Stearns, ed., Expanding the Past (New York, 1988), 215-50.
16. The bulk of the references to fear as the dominant modern execution remain western at most, though there are casual global claims. But Muslim scholars, like Tariq Ramadan, have written about pervasive Islamic fear of attacks or belittlement (and of defensive Israel's fear as well). The issue of comparative geographical scope warrants attention, as well as more precisely the kinds and degrees of fear prevalent in different places.
17. Stearns, American Fear.