Overview

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.

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9780199314607

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[An] indispensable new book, which belongs on the shelf of important works of American revisionism....Matt shows that we are reluctant immigrants, hesitant pioneers, unenthusiastic warriors, and ambivalent modernizers who really would have rather skipped all the unpleasantness and stayed home. - Peter Duffy, The New Republic What Matt's new reading of American history reveals is a culture crucially shaped by homesickness and nostalgia, a people at once deeply sentimentally tied to particular places and people, and simultaneously driven away from these beloved places by ambition, honor, duty, a desire to improve the fortunes of the family-or by war, drought, famine, land reclamation, or urban renewal...Her work is important not only because it is meticulously researched and skillfully written, but because it integrates aspects of the human condition that are intimately intertwined and too often separated: the economic and the emotional. -Emily Wilkinson, The Weekly Standard Brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed, Homesickness: An American History is original, refreshingly broad, and persuasive. With deep archival research and an eye for the telling detail, Susan Matt tells a powerful, enduring story of an important but often overlooked emotion in US history. Any proper understanding of the American national character is incomplete without this book. -Mark M. Smith, author of Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane This lively and sweeping book gives a concrete history to what seems like a universal emotion, by simultaneously jogging the reader's own memories while situating them in the broad context of U.S. history from the Pilgrims' Landing to the Frequent Flyer. Filling her book with vivid anecdotes of real people-from aspiring immigrants to runaway slaves to our troops in Iraq-Susan J. Matt finds that homesickness is the very heart of the American Dream. Writing at the cutting edge of deeply researched cultural history a

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

Author Information

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.

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