Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

The word happiness came into common usage in around the 17th century, but the concept has a much longer history. So how have people

understood the idea of happiness over time? And how have they sought to attain it?

Historian Katie Barkley is one of the editors of the Routledge History of Happiness, and she's

also written a feature sharing some historical secrets of happiness

for BBC History Magazine. I spoke to Katie to find out more. Thanks for joining me, Katie.

You've just written a feature for BBC History magazine, which investigates some secrets of happiness

through history. So hopefully we'll be able to share some of those with listeners as we go through.

But you're also one of the editors of the Routledge history of happiness.

Happiness is a very intriguing thing for historians to be studying because it's a really slippery concept.

How are you defining happiness?

Yeah, it's slippery and it's also really boring,

because it turns out that when we study happiness, we tend to look at, are you healthy,

you know, are you wealthy, are you wise, are you well educated? And so we have these kind of markers that sort of suggest that you're comfortable and that you're surrounded by the sorts of things that mean that you're not unhappy, I guess. And so it's kind of funny in a way that a lot of the time we spend more time interested in some of those practical markers of comfort than we are on how you actually feel in your soul or whether you're elated or joyful. In some ways, the studies of joy or

relation are a much smaller part of the field. And so in a way, we spend a lot of time thinking

about all those boring things that your mother tells you, drink lots of water and get exercise.

You know, if you're healthy, this is the way to happiness. So you're working in the field

of the history of emotions and for people who've come to this history podcast and they're thinking of history as something that's dates and battles and major milestones.

This might seem a very unusual field of study.

How as historians, when you're looking back for sources, are you studying something so subjective as emotions like happiness?

Well, emotions are everywhere in the records. I mean, because I guess people talk about them a lot, they write about them.

Art and literature is just absolutely full of emotion, love and hate, and people are using those words.

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