In his 1941 essay titled “Sensibility and History,” the historian Lucien Febvre lamented what he saw as scholars’ singular focus on the rational, reason and the intellectual. As fascism threatened to overrun Europe and his home country of France, Febvre thought he saw proof that the political, economic and intellectual—so often assumed in his day to be the basis for the unfolding of historical events—had been overtaken by the emotional. Not to study historical events such as the rise of National Socialism in Germany as emotional, irrational, mad would leave historians collaborators to “a field of fetid corpses,” and further, Read more