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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