You Had to Be There

"I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he'd just asked me to solve a quadratic equation in my head. "I guess it probably stung, and then his thumb throbbed?" I ventured, remembering actually banging my own thumb a few weeks back while assembling an IKEA desk. Boddice nodded, then said, "Let me ask you again. What did it feel like for him?""

""Emotions and senses" refers to history focused less on the facts of the past than on its more ineffable qualities, such as the smells of a 19th-century city filled with thousands of horses, and the quality of grief expressed in the letters of widows during World War I. Boddice is interested in a deeper, more expansive concept that encompasses everything about how reality is perceived, melding together emotions and senses and much else into an engagement with "experience.""

The history of emotions and senses treats past life through perceptions, bodily sensations, and cultural expressions rather than focusing solely on events or facts. Expanding the field into a history of experience integrates emotions, sensory perception, memory, and imaginative reconstruction. Sensory details such as urban smells or letters’ expressions of grief become primary sources for understanding how past people perceived reality. The approach challenges simplistic models like a small set of universal emotions and promotes interdisciplinary methods, thought experiments, and empathetic imagination to approximate how living bodies in different times felt and interpreted their environments.

Read at The Atlantic