"Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune ""Home, Sweet Home,"" they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back.
Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties.
By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity."
Introduction 1. Emotions in Early America 2. Painful Lessons in Individualism 3. A House Divided 4. Breaking Home Ties 5. Immigrants and the Dream of Return 6. Transferring Loyalties 7. Mama's Boys, Organization Men, Boomerang Kids, and the Surprising Persistence of the Extended Family Conclusion: Of Helicopter Parents, Facebook, and Wal-Mart: Homesickness in Contemporary America Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index
Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930.
Reviews for Homesickness: An American History
This is a very well balanced study covering all possible sources of homesickness and range of feelings ... this book is loaded with raw and intense expressions of emotion seldom uncovered, and the context of each group explaining the range of feeling is well documented. Gary Cross, Journal of Social History Future writers, historical and otherwise, might be well served to use the vivid portrait Matt provides to identify the substance of this perpetual pain and imagine by what logics it may ever be overcome. Kathryn Lofton, Journal of American History
