Frogs and Feeling Communities: A Study in History of Emotions and Environmental History

This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human–frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relation with the living planet. In tracing human–frog relations over time we tease apart the complex historic relationships between cultural frameworks, scientific expectations and conventions, and the texts and images emerging from these contexts, which operate explicitly or implicitly to train and discipline the emotional selves of human adults and children.