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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