Affective History, Effective Truth

The latest issue of Rethinking History includes an article by Emily Robinson that explores the relationship between emotion and the practice of history. It bears reading several times for the ideas it contains, especially regarding the nature of historical practice as an intellectual process, but one of its most intriguing implications lies in what the "affective turn" means for places like Colonial Williamsburg and the people who are, in many ways, on the front lines of the historical field. In the scholarship of Early American history, interesting works about the role of feeling and sentiment in the revolutionary era--such as Sarah Knott's Sensibility and the American Revolution and Nicole Eustace's Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the Revolution--have begun to appear with regularity. My own dissertation (Constitutional Sense, Revolutionary Sensibility: Political Cultures in the Making and Breaking of British Virginia) is in many ways an exploration of the epistemological tensions between reason and feeling traced in transatlantic political thought and behavior in the eighteenth century.

The "affective turn" has hit those who practice public history especially hard. Much of CW's regular programming, such as Rev City and the "In the moment" tours of the Capitol and Palace, seek to connect visitors with the conflicting, contingent emotions generated by important events in America's revolutionary history. It also shows up in other living history museums, such as Plimoth Plantation. On the other side of the ocean, BBC Two is devoting much of its history programming this fall to shows that attempt to do the same thing. Chief among them is Amanda Vickery's "At Home with the Georgians," in which she wants to "breathe life" into eighteenth-century buildings and other spaces.

In trying to make the past more present and immediate (BBC Two's pithy tag line is "The History of Us, Then") historians should chase effective truth as we follow the affective turn. To approach a verrita effetuale (Machiavelli's concept central to those of us interested in the study of discourse and put to such valuable interpretive use by J. G. A. Pocock) of the revolutionary world requires us to understand it, as nearly as possible, in all the ways in which it actually was, not as our visitors and others wish it to have been. It requires us to make a special, interdisciplinary effort to reconstruct the varied ways in which people experienced their world and developed their many faceted understandings about it.

Such an approach demands as much attention to reason as to passion, to the ideas that inspired extraordinary actions, and to the deeply personal nature of that process. It is understanding both the sense and the sensibility of America's revolutionary world, and the intensely intimate nature of the ways in which people negotiated the two, that is to me the most interesting challenge that public and academic historians (those with and without a mass of letters after their names) face. As we endeavor to find innovative, multimedia ways to engage visitors, students, and readers, we should remember that the foundation of our collective effort is an attempt to reach their minds as well as their hearts.