In this article, I discuss the Cold War as a label, meaning, and referent in academic research. I consider how the label “the Cold War” focuses attention on the conflict between the United States and USSR and draws attention away from the Global South. I show how academics often use the category the Cold War as a diminished subtype of interstate war, with the adjective cold calling attention to the absence of direct military combat. I analyze the meanings and referents associated with different ways of “casing” the Cold War: a case of cold war, a case of interstate rivalry, and a case of empire building. I also examine the separate meanings of the Cold War when it is treated as a world-historical time versus an event. Using the essays in this special issue, I examine how sociologists study the Cold War as an empirical referent. I find that the cultural orientation of sociology emphasizes symbolic and performative aspects of the Cold War that are not traditionally emphasized in work on the Cold War.

Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of “transboundary entanglements” – patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from sociology to international relations, and including subfields from postcolonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call “global methodological relationalism” and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a “global historical sociology” oriented around “global methodological relationalism” can assess the significance of “transboundary entanglements.”

The city of Gelsenkirchen, a center of mining located in the most industrialized part of Germany, the Ruhr region in the west, had the dubious honor of inspiring a mocking name for interior design: from the 1930s onward, the heavy, ornate furniture the working class showed a taste for was known as “Gelsenkirchen Baroque,” a term that lampooned how an ascending group did not know the difference between propriety and pompousness. While the city of Gelsenkirchen forged a “Barock Krieg” to eradicate the term in the 1950s, it chose a more successful strategy to change the feeling rules toward Gelsenkirchener Barock in the early 1990s. With the city grappling with the consequences of deindustrialization, the municipality aimed at rehabilitating its image and the original pride of the furniture’s working-class owners by celebrating a Gelsenkirchener Barock festival, the city’s biggest PR initiative to this day. Marrying conceptual history, emotions history, and design history with social history, the article goes beyond the individual case study and shows that to understand taste-making processes, the emotional politics they entailed are crucial. The highly emotional debates over value and taste in specific historical and spatial contexts are vital for grasping the development and change of feeling rules.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), an unprecedented number of soldiers wrote “military memoirs,” firsthand accounts of the “first total war.” Next to private forms of recording experiences and keeping contact with those at home, such as letters or diaries, these memoirs were part of a larger shift in the relations between the army and civil society: soldiers wrote, at least partly, to change what non-combatants thought about them. As Britain did not see battles on home soil, war was both omnipresent and far away. Moreover, the reputation of the British armed forces was notorious, with common soldiers famously called “the scum of the earth” by Wellington. In conveying the battlefield experience to a sheltered audience, military memoirs, especially those written during or shortly after the wars, aimed at bridging the emotional divide between military and civil life, between the callous soldier and the compassionate citizen. Soldiers, too, these texts argued, were men of feeling, able to preserve a moral sense of respectability despite all the killing, blood, and trauma. Many memoirs communicated viscerally and in graphic detail about the horrors of war, both to make the traumatizing experience understandable and to show the heights of their emotional self-discipline. Bringing together the history of biography, reading, and emotions, this article argues that, by writing frankly about their horrific experiences, British soldiers fighting during the Napoleonic Wars contributed to changing civil society’s feeling rules about the army, reproaching the civilians’ contempt, and soliciting their compassion.

Feeling rules are norms surrounding emotions, particularly emotional expressions in social contexts, and are a well-known aspect of human societies in both the past and present. As a subdiscipline, the history of emotions has found great profit in tracking changing feeling rules over time to better understand social formations. Emotional norms are culturally, geographically, and socially specific, providing coherence to communities or serving as instruments of distinction within them. Yet some historians have found a sole focus on the normative insufficient for grasping, in their entirety, the historical aspects of emotions and their specific functions. This special issue suggests some new ways to think about escaping the dualism of emotional norms and emotional experiences – or, put more broadly, of structure and subjectivity – without privileging either as the determining factor in shaping social relations. To show the interrelations between rules and experiences, we draw from sociological work on taste and social distinction, arguing that emotions become socially potent and drivers of historical change by being both means and objects of value judgments. This introduction provides an overview of feelings rules and emotional norms in the history of emotions, connects these to work in the sociology of taste, and introduces the case studies in the special issue.

This article argues that commemoration practices performed in the aftermath of the First World War, on occasion of the British Armistice Day, and during the two minutes’ silence in particular, served as incubators for a change in feeling rules for the British population. It will show how British society engaged with, challenged, and finally shifted what the “emotional regime” of the period – commonly referred to as the “stiff upper lip” – commanded them to feel. A very short lapse of time – two minutes – turned into a moment where a fundamental change in an important subset of feeling rules specifying this emotional regime became manifest: those applied to male weeping. The two minutes encapsulated a challenge to the harsh contempt for expressive mourning through the shedding of tears, a verdict that was inherited from the nineteenth century but increasingly seemed inappropriate, not the least in the wake of the emotional turmoil that Britons had faced during the “Great” War.

Amidst the post-war “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) in Germany, the government tapped into foreign labor resources, including Turkish “guest workers.” Over the years, Turkish immigrants and their descendants have remained central to societal discussions, particularly since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rose to leadership in Turkey, garnering a devoted voter base among this demographic. Drawing on the concepts of emotional community, feeling rules, and emotion work, I trace how the affinity towards Erdoğan is, in part, fueled by conflicts arising from broader tensions between the German majority and the Turkish-origin community. For many, the allure of “Erdoğanism” lies in its provision of ethno-nationalist solidarity, offering a coping mechanism for enduring societal challenges, even after decades in Germany. Employing narrative analysis, this article delves into how the embrace of “Erdoğanism” appears to serve as a means to suppress feelings of national humiliation and evoke a hubristic sense of national pride.

In recent years, social scientists have “(re)discovered history” by visiting archives, collecting documents, and analyzing their findings to address concerns about the causes and consequences of violence. Nevertheless, social scientists frequently appear at their archives with little to no training on the methods and ethics of archival research as they increasingly rush to examine primary historical records. This has resulted in a dearth of discourse on how the practice of historical research influences the outcomes of our analyses. Our article, as a result, employs findings from research on political violence in sociology and political science, as well as insights from history and archival studies, to introduce three broad ethical concerns related to politics, interpretation, and harms and benefits that, we argue, have methodological implications for historical social science. These methodological implications are too often ignored in historical social science, but we contend they are necessary to consider prior to and during archival research, as well as afterward when analyzing data, in order to ensure that the results of that research are valid, reliable, and ethical despite the constraints involved in working with historical evidence. We also discuss contemporary conflicts and how data collection on violence influences our understanding of the past. The objective of this article is to identify and address the primary challenges that social scientists who work with archives encounter, as well as to advocate for increased transparency in archival research.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of a phenomenon known as “lonely death” (kodokushi 孤独死): people who die alone and whose death goes unnoticed for a certain period of time. This has triggered public anxiety and moral panic because lonely death is often perceived as a form of “bad death” and a sign of the breakdown of family ties and neighborly relations. In the 2020s, this “feeling rule,” which associates lonely death with shame and fear, has quietly begun to be challenged by a group of post-mortem cleaning workers. By sharing their work experience and feelings through blogs, artworks, and books, the workers’ accounts of how they deal with the remnants of the deceased have turned the public perception of lonely death from an abstract, totalizing, fearful category into an understanding that such incidents have specific causes that can be faced and even prepared for. The cleaners’ emotional labor, especially their mourning for the dead, creates a sense of relatedness to the deceased, a feeling which is conveyed to the public through the cleaners’ narratives. The cleaners thereby change the feeling rules associated with the labor of dealing with the aftermath of a lonely death, turning it from “dirty work” into meaningful social action. This article contributes to an understanding of feeling rules by highlighting how individuals’ efforts, particularly, their reflections on their emotional labor, can change collective feeling rules.

Many early modern Italian nobles were obsessed with duelling. Despite bans from secular authorities and the Council of Trent, the violent honor complex was veiled in part under the title of the scienza cavalleresca, the knightly science, which provided rules for the conduct of conflicts between aristocrats and those with noble aspirations. Such rules were both concerned with emotions and the object of emotions. Using the tools of the history and sociology of emotions, this article contributes to the emotional history of the scienza cavalleresca through examining the rules proposed both as feeling rules in themselves and as objects of emotional judgment. Toward the turn of the eighteenth century, more aristocrats began rejecting such codes with explicit objections to the scienza cavalleresca and its ethical basis. One such noble was Paolo Mattia Doria (1667–1746), a notorious duellist in the closing years of the Spanish regime, who renounced the vendetta and expressed disgust with its practitioners. A zealous convert against the noble vengeance system, he will serve as an example to explore the wider struggle over emotional values in early modern Italy and, more generally, in societies with high levels of violence. The article traces the role of emotions in the scienza cavalleresca, the taste for dispute through one genre (letters of challenge or cartelli di sfida), then explores the case of Doria. From these three stages, the article argues for the significance of adopting approaches from the sociology of emotions to analyze elite cultures of violence.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

The articulations of science and politics in the Cold War in the United States are well studied in histories of American political culture. However, these histories are often given focus and coherence via concepts and understandings taken from political realism and sociological institutionalism, thereby underestimating the transformations in the very idea of political reality that helped form the Cold War era in the United States. This paper launches an investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and scientific and political discourse during that era to explore how the political culture of the United States came to be structured not only by a certain imagination but also by a particular set of fantasies. Building on the history of war-gaming at the RAND Corporation, the author conducts a close reading of a RAND Corporation report turned popular science publication. This suggests that, during the Cold War, a new standpoint from which to view the political world – the view from outer space – began to organize how the American political project for the globe represented its own modernity to itself. This view, drawn from science fiction but made real in its ethos and its political consequences, projected an understanding of “mankind” as but an infant in the early stages of what would become its interstellar destiny. A baleful consequence of this view was its tendency to free political actors and intellectuals from the urgent problem, identified acutely by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Man’s Conquest of Space,” of creating a world in common on earth.

This article focuses on the discussions around female athletes and their emotions in the German and Austrian press of the 1920s. In the course of the sports boom of the interwar years, more and more women participated in public sports competitions and demanded their right to be taken seriously as sportswomen. Their public appearance aroused mixed feelings and heated social debates about how much and what kind of sport was appropriate for women, which were reflected in discussions and narratives around the figure of the “sportsgirl.” Sportsgirls were imbued with a novel emotional style to which ambition and audacity – ways of feeling that were cultivated during competitive sports and that contrasted with traditional bourgeois female feeling rules – were key. Sportsgirls and their emotional style were the subject of many stories, reports, pictures, and articles that were published in the growing sports press of the time – and they were judged and evaluated for the emotional style they embodied. The press was a potent platform and site of the formation of feeling rules; as such, discussions around sportsgirls point to the (embodied) experiences of the athletes and indicate how the emotional style that derived from them was turned into a tool to reshape social conventions and feeling rules for women beyond the sports arena.

Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disentangle reasons for the high levels of persistence we find.