What is the history of sensibilities? on cultural histories, old and new

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 661-684

  Wickberg, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547474112     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.3.661     Document Type: Review

References (181)

1. For discussions of this shift from social to cultural history, see Daniel Wickberg, "Heterosexual White Male: Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History," Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 136-157;
2. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005).
3. Lucien Febvre, "Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past," in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York, 1973), 12-26.
4. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991);
5. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998);
6. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
7. David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley, Calif., 2002);
8. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White-The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005);
9. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
10. Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002): 154-173;
11. Eric Arnesen, "Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (2001): 3-32.
12. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977);
13. Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs; The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985);
14. Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1992);
15. Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-image (New York, 1999);
16. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999);
17. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998);
18. John Phillips Resch, Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1999);
19. Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville, Fla., 2002);
20. Elizabeth White Nelson, Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C., 2004);
21. Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C., 2000).
22. On slavery as an object of sentimental texts, see, for instance, Shirley Samuels, "The Identity of Slavery," in Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment, 157-171.
23. On liberal Protestantism and sentimentalism, see, for instance, James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, Md., 1985), 73-113.
24. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "Clio and the Culture Concept: Some Impressions of a Changing Relationship in American Historiography," in Louis Schneider and Charles Bonjean, eds.,
25. The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 77-100;
26. Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations (Homewood, Ill., 1973);
27. John Higham, "The Cult of the 'American Consensus': Homogenizing Our History," Commentary 27 (1959): 93-100;
28. Higham, "Beyond Consensus: The Historian as Moral Critic," American Historical Review 67, no. 3 (April 1962): 609-625.
29. For an example of the use of the term "counterprogressive history," see David W. Noble, The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980 (Minneapolis, 1985).
30. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996), 1. On the significance of Huizinga,
31. see William J. Bouwsma, "The Waning of the Middle Ages Revisited," in Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 325-335.
32. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1983), 87.
33. On the different forms of cultural history, see Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), especially 183-212;
34. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989);
35. Hunt and Victoria Bonnell, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
36. S.v. "sensibility," Oxford English Dictionary;
37. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, ed. Daniel N. Robinson (1855; repr., Washington, D.C., 1977), 122;
38. George Henry Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind (Boston, Mass., 1877);
39. E. Hamilton, "Mr. Lewes's Doctrine of Sensibility," Mind 4, no. 14 (1879): 256-261;
40. Edgar A. Singer, Jr., "On Sensibility," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 14, no. 13 (1917): 340.
41. Erik Erämetsä, A Study of the Word "Sentimental" and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth Century Sentimentalism in England (Helsinki, 1951), 88-90;
42. Janet Todd, Sensibility; An Introduction (London, 1986), 7-8,23-31,88-109;
43. John Mullen, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988);
44. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992);
45. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (New York, 1996);
46. G. S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (New York, 2004).
47. For an examination of sensibility in the eighteenth-century American context, see Sarah Knott, "Sensibility and the American War for Independence," American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 19-40.
48. Williams, Keywords, 280-283.
49. Ibid., 89-91;
50. Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
51. Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Lincoln, Neb., 2001);
52. Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 33-54;
53. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968);
54. Stocking, A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 (Chicago, 1989);
55. Richard Handler, "Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture," American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1990): 252-273.
56. See, for instance, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, "Food for Changing Sensibilities," Perspecta 6 (1960): 2-3.
57. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965). See especially the reference to "the modern spiritual sensibility" on p. 78.
58. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; repr., New York, 1976).
59. See Thomas Bender, "Lionel Trilling and American Culture," American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1990): 324-347.
60. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966), 276.
61. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 36-54, 94-120.
62. On the influence of Geertz on the new cultural history, see Ronald G. Waters, "Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and Historians," Social Research 47, no. 3 (1980): 537-556;
63. Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in Hunt, The New Cultural History, 12-13;
64. Aletta Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," ibid., 72-96;
65. Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Hunt and Bonnell, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 62-92;
66. Jean-Christophe Agnew, "History and Anthropology: Scenes From a Marriage," Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 2 (1990): 29-50.
67. Probably the most widely cited of Geertz's essays on historical writing are "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3-30;
68. and "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," ibid., 412-453.
69. T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), in Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), 241-250. quotation from 246.
70. F. W. Bateson, "Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms: II. Dissociation of Sensibility," Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 301-312;
71. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York, 1961), 138-166.
72. On the Marxist concept of ideology, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 55-71.
73. On the use of the notion of ideology by historians of republicanism and political thought, see Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992): 11-38.
74. On Geertz's notion of ideology, see Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 193-233.
75. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1971);
76. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).
77. On Kuhn and his use by historians, see David A. Hollinger, "T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History," in Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore, Md., 1985), 105-129;
78. Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 112;
79. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 526-537.
80. As most commentators on the idea of a history of mentalities or mentalités note, there has been a great deal of vagueness in the use of the term. Some seem to use it as a synonym for "popular attitudes," others for "informal thought," others for "cultural psychology." See Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, 162-182;
81. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 19-52;
82. Patrick H. Hutton, "The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History," History and Theory 20, no. 3 (1981): 237-259;
83. Hutton, "Philippe Ariès and the Secrets of the History of Mentalities," Historical Reflections 28, no. 1 (2002): 1-19.
84. The most widely known example of Febvre's work on the limits of cultural belief is Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
85. William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality" (1882), in James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (London, 1897), 63-110.
86. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128-135, quotation from 132.
87. The idea of "structures of feeling" has proved much more popular with students of literary and cultural studies than with historians. For a work that uses Williams's concept, see Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001).
88. For the distinction between formalism and anti-formalism as elements of religious cultures, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
89. Formalism and anti-formalism have been treated much more extensively by intellectual historians. See Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (Boston, 1957);
90. Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 149-188;
91. Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, Md., 1998), 307-367.
92. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 170;
93. Donald Fleming, "Attitude: The History of a Concept," Perspectives in American History 1 (1967): 287-365.
94. Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (New York, 1992), 92-93.
95. For an example of a historian's use of habitus, see Linda Young, " 'Extensive, Economical and Elegant': The Habitus of Gentility in Nineteenth Century Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 24 (2004): 201-220.
96. On issues of structure, agency, and power in social theory and history and how Bourdieu fits into those issues, see William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 137-139.
97. For an interpretation that stresses Bourdieu's consistency with the political outlooks of social history and distinguishes habitus from mentalité in terms of agency, see Julian Vincent, "The Sociologist and the Republic: Pierre Bourdieu and the Virtues of Social History," History Workshop Journal 58 (2004): 140.
98. I am assuming that the criticisms that anthropologists and historians have aimed at the early- and mid-twentieth-century concepts of culture, as well as at more recent Geertzian notions of culture as a semiotic system, would be similar in kind to those aimed at the approach I am advocating-that they provide a false notion of uniformity and consensus, thereby hiding the battle over meaning arising from differential power situations. See Agnew, "History and Anthropology"; Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture /Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1994), especially 22,
99. where the editors state that Geertz "never confronted the issue of power"; George E. Marcus and Michael M. J, Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986);
100. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York, 1992);
101. Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, N.C., 2006);
102. William H. Sewell, Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Gabrielle Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005), 76-95.
103. The difference between interpretive and explanatory approaches, or descriptive and causal accounts, goes deep into the history of historiography and the philosophy of history. Perhaps its most explicit formulation was in the debate between Carl Hempel and William Dray over "covering laws" in historical explanation, in which Hempel argued that all historical accounts involve causal explanations deduced from general laws, while Dray followed Collingwood and others in emphasizing that historical accounts involve a rethinking of the motives and understandings of historical actors, or a kind of descriptive explication of meaning. The issue thus speaks to whether history is to be understood as a nomothetic or ideographic discipline, as a social science or a humanistic discipline. See Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942): 35-48;
104. Dray, Laws and Explanations in History (New York, 1957);
105. Novick, That Noble Dream, 393-400;
106. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality.
107. On the shift in the social sciences from causal mechanics to interpretive understandings, see Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought," in Geertz, Local Knowledge, 19-35.
108. Marxist and Foucauldian approaches seem equally obsessed with the idea that power-however abstractly defined-is necessarily situated in culture; the analysis of cultural forms becomes a means of situating those forms and meanings in relationship to power. This view often leads back to the analysis of social categories, identities, and objects such as race, class, and gender as at the core of culture, since these social categories express power relations most explicitly. The foregrounding of such categories, however, may tell us much more about the sensibilities of contemporary analysts than about the sensibilities of those people in the past we are trying to understand. On the idea of power in cultural history, see Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, Culture/Power/History;
109. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980);
110. Jeffrey C. Alexander, "Understanding the Relative Autonomy of Culture," in Alexander and Steven Seidman, eds., Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (Cambridge, 1990), 21-25.
111. For an example of the ways in which account books can be used, in conjunction with the writings of political economists and novelists, to unpack a cultural sensibility, see Mary Poovey's discussion of double-entry bookkeeping in A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), 29-65.
112. William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York, 2000), 7-12.
113. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955);
114. Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1974). For discussions of Hofstadter and his role in American historiography,
115. see David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006);
116. Christopher Lasch, "Foreword," in Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, vii-xxiv;
117. Alan Brinkley, "In Retrospect: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform - A Reconsideration," Reviews in American History 13, no. 3 (1985): 462-480;
118. Daniel Joseph Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography," American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (October 1984): 976-1004.
119. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1983);
120. Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983);
121. Glenn Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (New Haven, Conn., 1988);
122. Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, Calif., 1991);
123. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001);
124. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J., 2001).
125. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago, 1965), 3-40.
126. David Brooks, "The Prosecutor's Diagnosis: No Cancer Found," New York Times, October 30, 2005, 13;
127. William Kristol, "The Paranoid Style in American Liberalism," The Weekly Standard 11, no. 16 (2006): n.p.
128. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994), 17.
129. See also Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York, 2003).
130. The expression "the world we have lost" comes from Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1973), but of course the idea of a golden age from which the present represents a falling away or a decline goes back at least to Hesiod and finds expression in central cultural symbols such as the Garden of Eden. Its use in modern historical argument derives more immediately from nineteenth-century sociology and its variety of binary distinctions between the social forms of medieval and modern. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between modern historical consciousness and the sense of a lost past,
131. see Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity," American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1587-1618.
132. The list of works that partake of some facet of the approach I am describing as the history of sensibilities is extensive. Some other exemplary works include Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989);
133. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, Md., 2001);
134. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York, 1983);
135. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977);
136. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982);
137. James W. Cook, The Ans of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
138. Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, N. Y., 1998);
139. David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920 (New York, 1995).
140. This debate, with contributions by John Ashworth, David Brion Davis, and Thomas L. Haskell, is compiled in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
141. David Brion Davis, "What the Abolitionists Were Up Against," in Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 45-46;
142. also in Bender, The Antislavery Debate, 22-23.
143. For the more detailed argument, of which this is a summary and restatement, see Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 333-493.
144. Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I," in Bender, The Antislavery Debate, 107-135,
145. and "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part II," ibid., 136-160;
146. Haskell, "Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth," ibid., 200-259, especially 224, where Haskell argues that "The rule of reciprocity that the Golden Rule embodies is so central to moral judgment that everything else that can be said by way of prescribing moral duty is gilding the lily. The idea of reciprocity was not new; it has been available in the form of biblical precept for at least two millennia, and by itself it provided an adequate prescriptive basis for devoting one's entire life to the liberation of slaves... [T]he sudden surge of humanitarian activism in the eighteenth century was not fundamentally a matter of prescription, no matter how indispensable prescription may have been to the outcome." For an alternative reading of the prescriptive orientation of the Golden Rule in proslavery thought,
147. see Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder's World View (Cambridge, 2005), 613-624.
148. The Haskell articles originally appeared, respectively, in the American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339-361; 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 547-566; and 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 829-878.
149. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in Hunt, The New Cultural History, 176-204;
150. Karen Halttunen, "Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror," in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago, 1993), 67-101;
151. Halttunen, "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture," American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303-334;
152. Elizabeth B. Clark, " 'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 463-493.
153. See also Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996);
154. Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).
155. Febvre, "Sensibility and History," is more an argument for the history of emotions than for the history of what I am calling sensibilities. For developments in the last twenty-five years,
156. see Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards, "American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813-836;
157. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago, 1986);
158. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994);
159. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Lives in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989);
160. Jan Lewis and Peter N. Stearns, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998);
161. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001);
162. John C. Spurlock and Cynthia A. Magistro, New and Improved: The Transformation of American Women's Emotional Culture (New York, 1998);
163. Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821-845;
164. Joanna Bourke, "Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History," History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 111-133;
165. Andrew Cayton, "Insufficient Woe: Sense and Sensibility in Writing Nineteenth-Century History," Reviews in American History 31, no. 3 (2003): 331-341.
166. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass. 1986);
167. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thorn (New York, 1998);
168. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York, 1994);
169. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001);
170. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
171. George H. Roeder, Jr., "Coming to Our Senses," Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 1112-1122;
172. Mark M. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History,"Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 165-186;
173. Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore, Md., 2003);
174. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003);
175. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000);
176. Mark M. Smith, "Making Scents Make Sense: White Noses, Black Smells, and Desegregation," in Peter N. Stearns, ed., American Behavioral History: An Introduction (New York, 2005), 181-198;
177. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).
178. See, for instance, Donald M. Lowe. History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago, 1982). But Leora Auslander and others have argued that vision is denigrated as a source of knowledge in contemporary intellectual discourse by a relentless focus on language and abstraction. The advocates of "visual culture" are arguing that we have overlooked the visual, at the very moment that the advocates for a history of hearing or smelling are arguing that we have given primacy to the visual over the other senses.
179. See Auslander, "Beyond Words," American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1015-1045.
180. Rath, How Early America Sounded, 9.
181. For an example of an influential work that takes slavery as an object of representation around which to orient its cultural analysis, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997).