How Do Emotions Influence Historical Change?

Until relatively recently, emotions were only studied in isolation, rather than as an interconnected component of history. Consequently, the idea that emotions actively produced or at least influenced historical change has also only recently been considered by scholars. Throughout history, individuals involved in active political and historical change regarded their actions as reasoned and uninfluenced by emotions. Today, historians that study emotions generally agree that emotions are present in individuals responsible for historical change. However, it is not clear to what extent emotions influence historical change. Further, whether emotions alone can actually produce historical change is yet to be determined. More recently, historical case …show more content…
These guidelines represent the emotional regime. Further, the emotional management - which involves supressing unaccepted emotions and expressing acceptable ones - that individuals in a regime engage in is usually employed in order to achieve a normative and accepted effect. For example, an individual involved in active political change may wish to express fear towards a minority group in order to normalise the expression of that emotion towards the group in the political regime. However, Reddy concedes that often the effects of emotional management are unexpected or undesired, and so may fall outside the normative expectations of emotional expression in the emotional regime. Reddy argues that this was the case when, in 1972, Edmund Muskie (American presidential nominee) cried on television in an expression of anger. Consequently, Muskie lost many of his supporters and dropped out of the presidential race because crying was not socially accepted as an expression of anger in that particular regime. Further, Reddy argues that in response to emotional restrictions in an emotional regime, emotional refuges are often set up by members of the population. Emotional refuges include meetings with likeminded individuals in cafes, Churches, bars and parks, and represent a place where emotions …show more content…
It is well understood that Adolf Hitler did not act alone in the events that unfolded during the Holocaust. Rather, minority groups were persecuted and affected by the laws put in place by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as a result of the actions of lower ranking Nazi officers and other seemingly ordinary people. The reason for their generally unwavering attraction and commitment to Nazism – that ranged from passive indifference to active participation in the atrocious treatment of human beings – has continyed to perplex historicans since the end of the Second World War. Many historians agree that the dire financial situation that Germany was in following the Great Depression and the Treaty of Versailles, where Germany was, amongst other conditions, made to pay reparations after the First World War contributed to the rise of Nazism. It was in this climate that Hitler and Nazi officials were able to use techniques of persuasion in propaganda in order to gain the support of Germany to place blame on the Jewish people and other minority groups. These techniques of persuasion, sometimes referred to as the mass society explanation of the rise of Nazism, are regarded by historians as appealing to irrational and unintellectual thought. Propaganda that was distributed throughout Germany prior to, and during, World War Two focused on persuading individuals with

Show More

Bronfenbrenner Analysis

Movement At Greenboro Lunch Counter Analysis

History and Memory Essay

Learning Perspectives and Engaging Strategies Essay

Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering of social life. Essay example

Censorship In George Orwell's 1984

Importance Of Developmental And Contextualism

Elie Wiesel Night Analysis

Essay about psych 41 review

Lester Horton Essay