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American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style
by
Cool. The concept has distinctly American qualities and it permeates almost every aspect of contemporary American culture. From Kool cigarettes and the Peanuts cartoon's Joe Cool to West Side Story (Keep cool, boy.) and urban slang (Be cool. Chill out.), the idea of cool, in its many manifestations, has seized a central place in our vocabulary.
Where did this preoccupation ...more
Where did this preoccupation ...more
Paperback, 378 pages
Published
April 1st 1994
by New York University Press
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Emotionology beginning with Victorian age to shift in the 1920s and how both emotional cultures appear in our experience in today's society. Characterizes Victorian culture as one that channeled emotions and characterized men and women as separate breeds with separate prescriptions to a shift in emotion management by dampening intensity of all emotions. This dampening occurred in context of increased interaction between genders on more equal playing field and large scale industrial and corporate
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got where this book was going--the focus on avoidance of emotion in the 20th century, shift from Victorian style which focused more on sublimation (emotion has to be there in order to be sublimated, whereas avoidance means never having the emotion in the first place). Stearns' book is weaker on implications for "cool" in the second half of the 20th century. How does this kind of cool relate to the other kind(s)/meanings of "cool"? That's another book -- a valid historical question, though.
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Peter N. Stearns is a professor at George Mason University, where he was provost, from January 1, 2000 to July 2014.
Stearns was Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also served as the Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, he founded and edited the Journal of Social History. While at Carnegie Mellon he developed a pioneering app ...more
More about Peter N. Stearns
Stearns was Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also served as the Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, he founded and edited the Journal of Social History. While at Carnegie Mellon he developed a pioneering app ...more
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