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Why Emotion Belongs in History
How Svetlana Alexievich’s writing helped me finally connect with the past
Looking in The Mirror
A few days ago, I stumbled across a photograph of a California family taken during the Spanish flu pandemic. Squinting into the camera over a century ago, they are all masked, even the family cat. The picture felt simultaneously distant and eerily immediate.
For me, the Spanish flu was mostly for me a piece of history, a set of dates and death tolls we brushed over in school after discussing World War I. And yet it felt immediate because I recognized the masks and expressions behind them. Looking at the image, it suddenly fascinated me that I knew nothing about people whose experience a century ago had so much to teach us about the present.
Emotion and human experience are invariably cast aside as historians search for hard facts. They want to know what happened, when it happened, and the quantifiable consequences. Growing up, I remember struggling to keep up with names and dates because bigger questions ran through my head. When I was in school, we learned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off World War I, but why would millions of people grind each other to death over something so impersonal and inconsequential? I had a particular…
