A HUMAN HISTORY OF EMOTION: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know

Richard Firth-Godbehere

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"A fascinating look at the profound ways in which the harnessing of human emotions has shaped world-wide history and culture. Eye-opening and thought-provoking!”

—Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain

In A HUMAN HISTORY OF EMOTION, Dr Firth-Godbehere maintains that some of the greatest moments in history aren’t about facts but about feelings. Significant historical events – from the origins of philosophy to the birth of Christianity, to the fall of Rome, to the Scientific Revolution, to some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced – can’t be understood without emotion.

Emotions are central to our history, and it is a complex, fascinating, surprising, alarming, and ironically a rather emotional history. This book is going to delve into how emotional behaviour throughout history – and even what people thought feelings were – has shaped human civilization.

The book will fall in to three main parts followed by an epilogue that will speculate our emotional future:

1.      Part 1 will discuss the time when virtue and honor ruled, from the Ancient Greeks, to the birth of Christianity, to the witch hunts of the seventeenth century.

2.      Part 2 will talk about how desire and similar emotions began to outstrip honor, and how this new focus pushed humanity to re-discover America, and later led to revolutions in science, America and France. This, in turn, created the nation-state as we know it and some of the bloodiest wars the world has ever seen.

3.      Part 3 will examine how recent history has been dominated by love and hate. From the use of hatred by Nazi Germany right through to the current climate where social media has become an emotional battleground. 

Richard Firth-Godbehere — BA (Hons) Q-Dip, MPhil (Cantab) PhD FHEA is an independent researcher and consultant in the history, language, science and philosophy of emotions. Regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on disgust and emotions, he is currently an Affiliated Research Scholar with The Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. He received a first-class degree from the University of London during which time he won two awards for academic excellence; alongside a Masters (MPhil) from the University of Cambridge and a PhD From Queen Mary, University of London where he was a Wellcome Trust Scholar. 

His award-winning interdisciplinary research walks the line between history, psychology, linguistics, and futurism. He examines how understandings of emotions change over time and how these changes can influence the wider world.