Five top books for understanding why we choose what we choose

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.

[The Page 99 Test: Common Sense: A Political History; The Page 99 Test: Democracy and Truth]

Her latest book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.

At Lit Hub Rosenfeld tagged five important books for understanding why we choose what we choose. One title on her list:

Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination is essentially a book about the declining tolerance for strong smells in 18th and 19th-century France. But it is more than that. In this and many subsequent books, Corbin makes the case that our sense perceptions and our emotions also have histories that can be recovered—and that doing so helps explain much about our collective social, political, and even everyday familial lives.

Read about the other titles on Rosenfeld's list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue