Why read Anger?

Book cover of Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History

Book description

In this groundbreaking social history, Carol and Peter Stearns trace the two hundred-year development of anger, beginning with premodern colonial America. Drawing on diaries and popular advice literature of key periods, Anger deals with the everyday experiences of the family and workplace in its examination of our attempts to control…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Anger as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Barbara H. Rosenwein

Author

Many historians before the Stearnses thought it would be good to study the emotions of the past, but this book on anger was the first to offer a rigorous and satisfying technique for doing so. By carefully researching the advice books offered to middle-class Americans in the nineteenth through twentieth centuries, the authors show how standards for emotional expression changed over time. Emotional standards are in fact key to understanding how different groups at different times evaluate their emotions, understand their uses, and feel their mental and physical impact.

From Barbara's list on the history of emotions.