© The Author(s) 2015

As the field of emotions history began to take shape in the 1980s, interdisciplinary challenges and opportunities loomed large. History was, obviously, not a lead discipline in research on emotion. Psychology headed the field, as is still the case— indeed, the Interdisciplinary Society for Research on Emotion, when formed a couple of decades ago, had arbitrarily to limit psychologists ’ membership to 50 % or they would have flooded the domain. But sociology and anthropology were also impor-tant, and some philosophers claimed a place as well. This framework had two implications. First, it meant that historians beginning to work on emotion had real opportunity to learn from established players, whether the issue was the debate over “basic ” emotion or more specific studies on emotional culture in the contemporary American workplace (Hochschild, 1983) or in settings like Tahiti (Levy, 1975). Methods and finding