Passion is the gale : emotion, power, and the coming of the American Revolution / Nicole Eustace ; designed by Kimberly Bryant.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eustace, Nicole, author.

Contributor:

Bryant, Kimberly, designer.

Series:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Emotions--Social aspects--United States--History--18th century.

Emotions.

United States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783--Causes.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (624 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale , Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America. From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

Contents:

Contents; List of Illustrations and Tables; Introduction: The Rising Tempest; 1 ''Passions Rous'd in Virtue's Cause'': Debating the Passions with Alexander Pope, 1735-1776; 2 The Dominion of the Passions: Dilemmas of Emotional Expression and Control in Colonial Pennsylvania; 3 ''A Corner Stone . . . of a Copious Work'': Love and Power in Eighteenth-Century Alliances; 4 Resolute Resentment versus Indiscrete Heat: Anger, Honor, and Social Status; 5 The Passion Question: Religious Politics and Emotional Rhetoric in the Seven Years War

6 ''The Turnings of the Human Heart'': Sympathy, Social Signals, and the Self7 ''Allowed to Mourn, but . . . Bound to Submit'': Grief, Grievance, and the Negotiation of Authority; 8 Ruling Passions: Surveying the Borders of Humanity on the Pennsylvania Frontier; 9 A Passion for Liberty-The Spirit of Freedom: The Rhetoric of Emotion in the Age of Revolution; Postlude: The Passions and Feelings of Mankind; Appendix: Toward a Lexicon of Eighteenth-Century Emotion; Acknowledgments; Notes; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908831-2-4

979-88-908831-3-1

0-8078-7198-2

1-4696-0082-X

OCLC:

966821464