Luke Fernandez

Susan J. Matt

Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states. But Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt show that technology doesn't just affect how we feel from moment to moment--it changes profoundly the underlying emotions themselves.

Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid

Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic representatives of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers.

An American History

Homesickness

Rob Boddice

Peter N. Stearns

Bettina Hitzer

Emotion and experience in the history of medicine : elaborating a theory and seeking a method / Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer -- Feeling the dis-ease of ebola : an invisible war / Emmanuel King Urey-Yarkpawolo -- Ebola wahala : breaching experiments in a Sierra Leonean border town / Luisa Enria and Angus Fayia Tengbeh -- History before corona : memory, experience, and emotions / Bettina Hitzer -- The binary logic of emotion in the sensorium of virtual health : the case of Happify / Kirsten Ostherr -- Third person : narrating dis-ease and knowledge in psychiatric case histories / Marietta Meier -- Feeling (and falling) ill : finding a language of illness / Franziska Gygax -- Beyond symptomology : listening to how Palestinians conceive of their own suffering and well-being / Heidi Morrison -- Forensic sense : sexual violence, medical professionals, and the senses / Joanna Bourke -- The concept of Leidensdruck in West-Ferman criminal therapy, 1960-85 / Marcel Streng -- The efficacy of Arcadia : constructing emotions of nature in the pained body through landscape imagery, c.1945-present / Brenda Lynn Edgar -- 'Fashionable' diseases in Georgian Britain : medical theory, cultural meanings and lived experience / James Kennaway -- From a patient's point of view : a sensual-perceptual approach to bed treatment / Monika Ankele -- Feeling Penfield / Annmarie Adams.

Experiencing Medicine and Illness

Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History

How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when "love" is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. Doing Emotions History explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. An international group of scholars reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates the affecting potential of doing emotions history. Contributors are John Corrigan, Pam Epstein, Nicole Eustace, Norman Kutcher, Brent Malin, Susan Matt, Darrin McMahon, Peter N. Stearns, and Mark Steinberg.

Doing Emotions History

A century ago many Americans condemned envy as a destructive emotion and a sin. Today few Americans expect criticism when they express envy, and some commentators maintain that the emotion drives the economy. This shift in attitude is Susan Matt's central concern. Keeping up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 examines a key transition in the meaning of envy for the American middle class. Although people certainly have experienced envy throughout history, the expansion of the consumer economy at the turn of the twentieth century dramatically reshaped the social role of the emotion. Matt looks at how different groups within the middle class—men in white-collar jobs, bourgeois women, farm families, and children—responded to the transformation in social and cultural life. Keeping Up with the Joneses traces how attitudes about envy changed as department stores, mail-order catalogs, magazines, movies, and advertising became more prevalent, and the mass production of imitation luxury goods offered middle- and working-class individuals the opportunity to emulate upper-class life. Between 1890 and 1910 moralists sought to tame envy and emulation in order to uphold a moral economy and preserve social order. They criticized the liberal-capitalist preoccupation with personal striving and advancement and praised the virtue of contentment. They admonished the bourgeoisie to be satisfied with their circumstances and cease yearning for their neighbors' possessions. After 1910 more secular commentators gained ground, repudiating the doctrine of contentment and rejecting the notion that there were divinely ordained limits on what each class should possess. They encouraged everyone to pursue the objects of desire. Envy was no longer a sin, but a valuable economic stimulant. The expansion of consumer economy fostered such institutions as department stores and advertising firms, but it also depended on a transformation in attitudes and emotional codes. Matt explores the ways gender, geography, and age shaped this transformation. Bridging the history of emotions and the history of consumerism, she uncovers the connection between changing social norms and the growth of the consumer economy.

Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties. By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity.

Susan J. Matt

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