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dot com and secure your seats today 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, 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.

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