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Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything "neuro." On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since "emotional intelligence" emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian's point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.

An English translation of a lost manuscript of reflections from former Czech dissident Václav Havel. 

In the fall of 1977, after the dramatic events of the “Year of Charter 77,” Václav Havel wrote a report recounting the first hours after the Charter 77 Declaration, the four months of investigative detention imposed on him by the communist regime, his release, and the agonizing self-examination that followed. In this text, the former dissident describes not only the investigation but also the Faustian guilt he felt after promising to scale back his political activities in exchange for his freedom. As he later recalled in a book-length interview with journalist Karel Hvíždala titled Dálkový výslech (Long-distance interrogation), he hid the roughly one-hundred-page manuscript somewhere, admitting: “I don’t know where it is anymore. Maybe I’ll find it someday.” He never did. The manuscript resurfaced only recently, discovered among the papers of his close friend Zdenek Urbánek. Fragmentary yet strikingly immediate, the text has been reconstructed and published by the Václav Havel Library, with the English translation appearing on the occasion of the world-renowned intellectual’s ninetieth birthday.

For decades, a fog of governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence kept the victims the mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II from understanding their experiences. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition with the twin goals of educating the general public and encouraging former inmates to come to grips with and tell their own history. 

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming the past. Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of the groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also analyzes how the dual act of recovering—and recovering from—history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.

Even with just forty-one recordings to his credit, Robert Johnson (1911-38) is a towering figure in the history of the blues. His vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, still encourage the speculation and myth that have long obscured the facts about his life. The most famous legend depicts a young Johnson meeting the Devil at a dusty Mississippi crossroads at midnight and selling his soul in exchange for prodigious guitar skills. 

Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch examine the full range of writings about Johnson and weigh the conflicting accounts of Johnson's life story against interviews with blues musicians and others who knew the man. Their extensive research uncovers a life every bit as compelling as the fabrications and exaggerations that have sprung up around it. In examining the bluesman's life and music, and the ways in which both have been reinvented and interpreted by other artists, critics, and fans, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found charts the cultural forces that have mediated the expression of African American artistic traditions.