Homesickness: An American History

by Susan J. Matt

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195371857
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2011
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"[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 and cementing her status as a master of analytical storytelling, she helps us understand why being American truly means that 'you can't go home again.'"—Scott A. Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

"A richly panoramic social and cultural history, extensively researched and beautifully written. As Susan Matt argues, historians have been far more apt to study those who came to America, rather than those who yearned to leave and return to previous homes. Focusing on the many Americans who sought to leave, or who yearned for another 'home' as they moved about the country, Matt provides a fascinating addition to several intersecting literatures on immigration, on westward expansion, on forced migration and slavery, on the Civil War and World Wars, and on the rise of modernity and 'alienated' individuals."—Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine

"People dying of homesickness? Susan Matt richly describes the history of an emotion that was at times so deeply felt that it was considered a deadly disease. With this sweeping and yet detailed survey, Matt demonstrates that emotions have histories. As Americans have learned to restrain this one, we may have forgotten how powerful this longing can be."—Claude S. Fischer, author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character

"Challenges the foundational stereotype of Americans as adventurous, intrepid, eagerly mobile individualists .Matt provides ample and convincing documentary and ethnographic evidence that Americans are nothing if not ambivalent about their mobility and nostalgic and homesick for the homes they leave behind." —CHOICE

"An engaging and well-argued read that will be of interest to students of American cultural history and interested general readers."—Library Journal

"Matt has amassed an impressive range of evidence and has ignored no group across the span of American history."—Gary Cross, Journal of Social History

"Susan J. Matt documents all the ways in which restless Americans have missed home-and how they've gradually learned to suppress their declarations of homesickness."—Libby Copeland, Slate

From the Publisher

The conventional narrative of America has been the story of migration, mobility, and the individualist spirit. But Matt (history, Weber State Univ., Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930) argues here that America has another often overlooked history: of homesickness. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as medical records and psychological studies, Matt shows that the individualism so celebrated as an American characteristic also had a flip side of homesickness, loss, and displacement. She takes the reader through the profound homesickness felt by Colonial Americans, soldiers during America's many wars, as well as the experiences of African Americans, displaced Native Americans, and Americans of other ethnic backgrounds who found themselves confronting the market revolution and industrialization. She argues that homesickness and nostalgia were common but were made into problems to advance a capitalist and individualist ideal in the 20th century. VERDICT An engaging and well-argued read that will be of interest to students of American cultural history and interested general readers.—Jessica Moran, California State Archives, Sacramento

Library Journal