From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

George W. Bush remains a highly controversial figure, a man for whom millions of Americans have very strong feelings. Dan McAdams' book offers an astute psychological portrait of Bush, one of the first biographies to appear since he left office as well as the first to draw systematically from personality science to analyze his life. McAdams, an international leader in personality psychology and the narrative study of lives, focuses on several key events in Bush's life, such as the death of his sister at age 7, his commitment to sobriety on his 40th birthday, and his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and his decision to invade Iraq. He sheds light on Bush's life goals, the story he constructed to make sense of his life, and the psychological dynamics that account for his behavior. Although there are many popular biographies of George W. Bush, McAdams' is the first true psychological analysis based on established theories and the latest research. Short and focused, written in an engaging style, this book offers a truly penetrating look at our forty-third president.

Being able to taste people's emotions in food may at first be horrifying. But young, unassuming Rose Edelstein grows up learning to harness her gift as she becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

An Entrepreneur Best Book of the Year Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don’t just affect how we feel—they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we’re bored, we don’t mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to consider how our feelings of loneliness, boredom, vanity, and anger have evolved in tandem with new technologies. “Technologies have been shaping [our] emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study. Marshalling archival sources and interviews, they trace how norms (say, around loneliness) have shifted with technological change.” —Nature “A powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience.” —Publishers Weekly

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In times of "fake news", processes of forgetting and practices of non-knowledge have sparked the interest of historical and sociological research. The common ground between all the contributions in this volume is the assumption that knowledge does not simply increase over time and thus supplant phases of not-knowing. Moreover, the contributions show that knowing and not-knowing function in very similar ways, which means they can be analysed along similar methodological lines. Given the implied juxtaposition between emotions and rational thinking, the role of emotions in the process of knowledge production has often been trivialized in more traditional approaches to the subject. Through a broad geographical and chronological approach, spanning from prognostic texts in the Carolingian period to stock market speculation in early-twentieth-century United States, this volume demonstrates the important role of emotions in the history of science. By bringing together cultural historians of knowledge, emotions, finance, and global intellectual history, Threatened Knowledge is a useful tool for all students and scholars of the history of knowledge and science on a global scale.

The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World brings together a diverse array of scholars to offer an overview of the current and emerging scholarship of emotions in the modern world. Across thirty-six chapters, this work enters the field of emotion from a range of angles. Named emotions – love, anger, fear – highlight how particular categories have been deployed to make sense of feeling and their evolution over time. Geographical perspectives provide access to the historiographies of regions that are less well-covered by English-language sources, opening up global perspectives and new literatures. Key thematic sections are designed to intersect with critical historiographies, demonstrating the value of an emotions perspective to a range of areas. Topical sections direct attention to the role of emotions in relations of power, to intimate lives and histories of place, as products of exchanges across groups, and as deployed by new technologies and medias. The concepts of globalisation and modernity run through the volume, acting as foils for comparison and analytical tools. The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of emotions across the world from 1700.

Social media, shopping experiences, and mapping programs might not seem like they have much in common, but they are all built on neurodigital media. What is neurodigital media? It lives at the intersection of the Californian Ideology, the digital computing revolution, network ecosystems, the nudge, and a naturalistic view of the person. The Californian Ideology holds individuals should be reshaped, naturalism says individuals may be reshaped, and digital computing provides the tools, through network ecosystems theory and the nudge, that can reshape individuals. This book explores the history and impact of neurodigital media in the lives of everyday users.