In his new book, “A Brief History of the Smile,” Yale University’s Angus Trumble (curator of Yale’s Center for British art) traces the development of the phenomenon from the stilted masklike expressions in early Greek sculpture to the yellow smiley face and its Internet counterpart. Here’s an interview with the author from CNET News.
His book began as a presentation to a group of dentists, finding in his research that it was the revolution in the standard of dental hygiene through the 19th century and into the 20th, and the invention of photography and later of motion pictures that popularized smiling.
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I am always amazed at the topics that can make a book that we take for granted! Thanks for this interesting post.