At the end of Thomas Wolfe's novel You Can't Go Home Again, the protagonist, George Webber, realized, “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” The idea that it is impossible to return home and to the past is commonplace today and a hallmark of modern consciousness.1 Yet generations of Americans have longed to go home, either to their actual childhood homes or to metaphorical homes located somewhere in the past. This essay examines how Americans have understood, expressed, and managed such yearnings for a lost home and traces how the modern perspective—that return is impossible—gradually emerged. It is a preliminary exploration of the history of homesickness and other emotions that often accompanied it, in particular, nostalgia.

Today, homesickness is defined as the longing for a particular home, nostalgia as a longing for a lost time. Nostalgia may carry within it a yearning for home, but it is a home faraway in time rather than space. Both emotions have existed throughout history, albeit under different names. Although some historians maintain that nostalgia, in particular, is a new emotion and an effect of the social, political, and economic changes of the last two or three centuries, such a claim seems questionable.2 Industrial capitalism and liberal democracy provide plentiful occasions for such yearnings, and individuals respond to them in historically specific ways, but there is little evidence that homesickness and nostalgia are wholly new feelings. Instead, those emotions gained new recognition in the modern age and took on new functions.

Although the feelings have long been experienced, the words to describe them have changed considerably. From the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the word “nostalgia” denoted homesickness. Only in the last century did “nostalgia” take on its current meaning. This linguistic tangle started in 1688, when Johannes Hofer, a Swiss scholar, created the word “nostalgia,” combining the Greek word nostos, “return to the native land,” with algos, the word for pain. He used this word to describe a new disease that affected young people far from home. Its symptoms included “continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep … decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, … cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, … stupidity of the mind—attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland.” The best remedy was to return sufferers home, for nostalgia could prove fatal.3

Hofer's discussion inspired others to address the problem. For a time doctors believed nostalgia was unique to Switzerland, but eventually cases were identified across Europe and in the Americas. Many observers believed some nations were better adjusted to modernity and that consequently, their citizens did not experience nostalgia. Scholars believed the British were unlikely to contract the illness because they were accustomed to commerce and colonization and therefore to relocation. Yet evidence from the eighteenth century shows otherwise. The word “homesickness” became part of the English language in the 1750s; doctors documented cases of it among Welsh soldiers in the 1780s.4

Until roughly a century ago, the words “nostalgia” and “homesickness” meant the same thing, although physicians tended to use the former, laypeople the latter. By the early twentieth century, the words began to diverge in meaning. While some doctors continued to use “nostalgia” to denote homesickness, a second meaning of “nostalgia” emerged—a bittersweet yearning for a lost time. The sociologist Fred Davis maintained that while the new meaning became attached to the word at the turn of the century, this sense of nostalgia remained “a fancy word,” used mostly by “psychiatrists, academic psychologists, and relatively few cultivated lay speakers,” until the 1950s.5 Eventually, however, the newer definition of “nostalgia” supplanted the original meaning.

In the twentieth century a fundamental divide opened up between the two words. While homesickness still denoted a psychological problem, nostalgia no longer did. Homesickness became a word—and a state—that carried some social stigma, while nostalgia did not. The word “homesickness” also implies that return home is at least theoretically possible, whereas nostalgia represents the longing for something indisputably unattainable: a past time. Other distinctions between the words (and the emotional states they described) also emerged: Nostalgia—once considered painful—gradually came to be identified as a sometimes pleasant sensation, whereas homesickness continued to be described as unremittingly painful. Yet while distinct, the words and the feelings they describe share a linguistic connection and an emotional one. Both represent a yearning for a lost sense of home, whether in time or in space. Scholars suggest that both homesickness and nostalgia may represent individuals' attempts to establish continuity with past selves. Longings for lost places, peoples, and times represent a desire to bridge past experience and present conditions.6

Before the particular words emerged, the yearnings existed. The question is: How should historians treat emotions that were not formally named by those who experienced them? What is the relationship between words and feelings? Jean Starobinski, the first historian to study homesickness and nostalgia critically, observed, “The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status.”7 Starobinski maintained that although individuals experienced homesickness and nostalgia throughout history, the invention of the terminology changed the meaning and experience of the emotions, transforming private feelings into a socially recognized problem and a disease.

This essay builds on Starobinski's observation, beginning its examination in the seventeenth century, when the words “nostalgia” and “homesickness” were first coined. It employs the words in accordance with their historical usage. Such attention to language is necessary, for over the course of four centuries, homesickness and nostalgia have gone from being largely unrecognized, or considered inconsequential, to being regarded as a single medical condition to being perceived as two different emotions, one childish, the other harmless. The way individuals express those feelings has also changed. Whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, individuals expressed homesickness publicly, in contemporary society, they often repress it. The one context where it is acceptable to display homesickness is the consumer marketplace, where it is tolerated and sometimes even encouraged. But should the homesick try to return home, they face shame and disapproval. What earlier generations interpreted as a love of home and family, contemporary Americans consider dysfunctional. In contrast, nostalgia, because it carries the recognition that it is impossible to turn back time, is a less potent and socially disruptive emotion, and it is in some cases considered the mark of a mature and modern outlook.

The history of these intertwined yearnings offers a way of gauging how individuals reacted to personal and social change. This essay explores the relationship between emotions and society, but it is not a study in “American character.” Instead, it seeks to uncover the complex and often contradictory record of how diverse Americans responded to the restless pace of American life. Because it covers four centuries and because it represents a preliminary exploration of an emotion, it does not address every type and expression of homesickness. Rather, it focuses on broad trends in the ways individuals managed, expressed, and channeled emotions. Whereas in earlier centuries Americans frequently saw movement through time and space as traumatic, today, while they may feel pained by such changes, they hesitate to show that emotion lest they appear maladjusted. Instead, they display the attitude that moving from home is necessary, and abandoning the past inevitable.

Homesickness in the Colonies

In the earliest days of European settlement in North America, many colonists longed for their faraway homes and displayed such longings publicly. The Europeans who migrated to America in the early seventeenth century did not have the modern lexicon to describe their feelings, but diaries, letters, and histories reveal that yearning was part and parcel of the colonizing experience. For instance, Edward Johnson, the seventeenth-century historian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reported the desperate emotions of early Puritan settlers as they tried to find their way in a new land while mindful of the distance that separated them from the old one. They not only “had but little left to feed on” and “were forced to lengthen out their owne food with Acorns,” but “that which added to their present distracted thought, the Ditch betweene England and their now place of abode was so wide, that they could not leap over with a lope-staff.”8

Similarly, Johan Printz, governor of New Sweden (now Delaware), repeatedly asked to return home. In 1644, he made the “humble prayer and request that when this term of three years is over I may be relieved and allowed to return again to … my Most Gracious Queen and my Fatherland, especially since I am no longer young and since the greatest part of my days have been hard and toilsome.” In 1647, he pleaded again: “I for a great while (namely twenty-eight years) have been in the service of my dear native country… . my humble request … is, that I be relieved, if possible, and sent home by the next ship to my beloved native land.” Printz felt no need to mask his feelings, and his wish was finally granted; in 1653 he returned to Sweden.9

While many colonists were eager to leave Europe and optimistic about their prospects, others harbored mixed feelings. In their new surroundings some felt both hope and a longing for home, others only despair. Contrary to the suggestion by the historian John Gillis that moves were not particularly traumatic for individuals in premodern Europe and America, there is significant evidence that many felt the pain of uprooting. For instance, John Harrower, an indentured servant who migrated to Virginia, yearned for his home and family in Scotland. In a poem composed in 1774, he wrote: “I am from my sweet wife seperated / And Oblidged to leave my Infant Childreen, Fatherless.” Harrower hoped that God, “at his appointed time / Will bring me back to my family, / if I his precepts do but mind.” To his wife, he confided, “I now rite you with a shaking hand and a feeling heart to enquir of your and my Dr. Infants welfare, this being the return of the day of the year on which I was obliged to leave you … which day will be ever remembred by me with tears untill it shall please God to grant us a happy meeting again.” Unfortunately, Harrower never did return to Scotland; he died in Virginia in 1777.10

While Harrower did not use “homesickness” to describe his emotions, some of his contemporaries did. By the eve of the Revolution, the word “homesickness” had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean; the word “nostalgia” appeared a few years later. Philip Vickers Fithian, a New Jersey native employed as a tutor on a Virginia plantation, complained repeatedly about his separation from friends and family in his journal. He wrote in 1773, “Rode to Church… . Dined at home—Mr Lee dined with us… . Feel very home-sick—Saw two Brothers quarrel—Doleful sight.”11

Although such scattered references to homesickness appeared in journals and letters, Americans first perceived the emotion as a widespread social problem during the Revolutionary War, when thousands of men left home to fight and countless soldiers complained of homesickness. Despite the discussions of the emotion in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neither American doctors nor American army officers displayed familiarity with that discourse. They talked of homesick soldiers with little sympathy and did not use the word “nostalgia.” They considered homesickness a character flaw, not a disease. In 1775, Gen. Charles Lee described American soldiers who pined for home: “Some of the Connecticutians who were homesick could not be prevailed on to tarry, which means in the New England dialect to serve any longer. They accordingly marched off bag and baggage.” Their fellow soldiers shamed them for succumbing to their emotions. “In passing through the lines of other regiments, they were so horribly hissed, groaned at, and pelted that I believe they wished their aunts, grandmothers, and even sweethearts, to whom the day before they were so much attached[,] at the devil's own palace.” George Washington was equally dismissive of those “disgracefully desiring to go home” and struggled to end the widespread absenteeism in the army.12

Despite such judgments from their commanders, many soldiers, animated by a mix of motives, deserted the army: some left because they missed home, some because they felt obliged to return to their families, who were struggling to get by without a breadwinner. Homesickness was not an emotion the army could afford to indulge, and men who succumbed to it faced at the very least shame and ridicule. Those who acted on it and deserted the Continental army faced the possibility of a death sentence as well.13

Unlike European army commanders, who often dealt sympathetically with nostalgics, Continental army officers had little patience with them. As the historian Sarah Knott has shown, American officers displayed a growing interest in demonstrating a fine and delicate sensibility; that, however, did not translate into sympathy for the homesick. The lack of interest in their plight may also have been due to the paucity of doctors trained in Europe and familiar with the emerging literature on nostalgia. To army commanders, the emotion signified a failure of will, character, and civic commitment. Civic virtue required sacrifice. Soldiers should endure the temporary discomforts of separation from their families for the sake of the new nation. After the war, the Philadelphia physician and revolutionary leader Benjamin Rush summed up this view, suggesting the republican citizen must “be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.” Such idealism may have pervaded the revolutionary enterprise, but it did little to allay the homesickness so many soldiers felt. The army's lack of sympathy for homesick soldiers was a consequence of the high value put on honor and civic virtue, the relatively low cultural value put on domestic life, and the lack of official acknowledgment of nostalgia as a medical condition.14

Homesickness in Antebellum America

In the wake of the Revolution, as so many traditions, political bonds, and national allegiances were abandoned, Americans became aware of what the historian Joyce Appleby termed their “firstness.” This generation was “the first to have rugs on their floors, to have steamboats and canals, national elections, public land sales, cheap newspapers, pianos wholly produced in the United States, and a president who wore shoe laces instead of buckles—and the list goes on.” As they departed from their pasts, they also departed from their homes: during the first half of the nineteenth century, a higher percentage of people crossed state lines to change residences than in any comparable later period. Such transformations left many Americans feeling optimistic about the boundless possibilities before them, but also dislocated.15

Individual Expressions of Homesickness

Historians have emphasized the optimism of many antebellum Americans, but as individuals looked forward with hope, they also looked back with regret. The historian Barbara H. Rosenwein has offered a way of understanding such mixed emotions, arguing that in any society there are several social settings, each with its own rules for behavior, through which individuals move in the course of a life, or even a day. They adjust their emotions, or at least their expressions of emotion, to fit their settings. Such an insight is useful for understanding antebellum Americans, who felt a variety of emotions—from optimism to displacement—and expressed them selectively. Christina Kotchemidova has shown that beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the present, a cheerful demeanor became increasingly demanded in public life. Consequently, many Americans, while heartsick at leaving home, may have tried to put on a public face of optimism. In more private interactions they revealed hesitancy and grief.16

Not only might social setting affect the way individuals experienced and expressed their emotions; social roles and ranks also influenced them. In the middle class, men and women experienced the changes and dislocations of nineteenth-century life differently. Women's lack of power and autonomy exacerbated their homesickness. They often could not decide for themselves whether they stayed at home or left it; other members of the family, generally male, made those decisions. For instance, Jemima Sanborn, born in 1798, was forced to leave her Bristol, New Hampshire, farm and some of her offspring in 1843. Because of financial difficulties, she moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, to set up housekeeping with her daughters who were working in mills. Her husband, meanwhile, traveled back and forth between farm and town. Of her situation, she wrote, “It is quite apleasant place hear but it don't seeme much like home. It would seeme more like home if any of my folks lived here you know I never was weaned from fathers house before… . I suppose I must try and bare with it… . I am as lonesome as you can think here among all strangers.”17

Sanborn's desire to stay on the farm was subordinated to the needs of the family economy. Unlike her husband, she could not move as easily nor choose her location. This lack of control may have intensified her homesickness. Likewise, Roxana Wall, moving from New York to Ohio in 1834 because of her husband's business, spelled out the reason so many women migrated when they did not want to: “it seems to me to be a great undertaking to go to Ohio, and live so far from my friends. However if it is for our interest I must be content in doing so.”18

While local and regional migrations caused homesickness, even more traumatic were the long journeys to the far West. Again, women felt differently about these undertakings and leave-takings than did their fathers, husbands, and sons. Amelia Stewart Knight, who left Iowa for Oregon in 1853, confided to her diary, “Husband is scolding and hurrying all hands (and the cook) and Almira says she wished she was home, and I say ditto. ‘Home, Sweet Home.’” In 1849, on the second day of her family's trip from Iowa to California, Catharine Haun broke “completely down with genuine homesickness and I burst out into a flood of tears.” Jane Gould Tourtillot, en route to California in 1862, wrote: “Today is the Fourth of July and here we are away off in the wilderness… . We wonder what the folks at home are doing and oh, how we wish we were there.”19

Whether laboring in mills or moving West, white women felt homesickness frequently. Their emotions illuminate the conflicting demands of middle-class womanhood. On the one hand, women had limited control over their own mobility. Where they lived depended on the decisions of fathers or husbands; powerful social ideals taught them to submit to such decisions. On the other hand, women, tied to home by ideology, the division of labor, and social bonds, were supposed to be domestic creatures. Their role was to create a home and imbue it with love. These ideals of feminine behavior did not always sit easily together, for in such a scheme, women were to be defined by home but also willing to leave it.20

Men also faced conflicting expectations. They were to be both ambitious individuals and loving family men. They had to learn how to balance those imperatives, and their education often started early—and sometimes without their consent. In 1843 thirteen-year-old Sidney Roby was sent to an academy in Brockport, New York. From there he wrote a stream of letters, begging his family to let him return home to Sconondoa, New York. In 1844 he wrote, “Dear Aunty[,] I arrived here safe last evening, but was very tired and homesick…. I went up to school today … almost as soon as I got there I began to be homesick and could not hardly keep from crying.” Roby's homesickness set in on the trip to Brockport. Along the way, “I would almost cry right out I would think of you and the folks at Syracuse all down there in the parlor. Then I would think of being at home … talking with Grand Father and Mother, and then be over to the store talking with Uncle Sidney, and then I would think of my situation…. Oh Aunty … the tears come down so fast that I can hardly write. Oh Aunty you cant think how I feel.”21

Roby had been raised by his grandparents and his aunt and uncle, and they missed him almost as intensely as he missed them. The family found consolation in the hope that the painful separation would yield future rewards. Roby wrote, “If it was not for one thing Grand Father I think I could not stay here[,] that is that I am now fitting myself to be something and to come home in time and be Uncle Sidney's clerk and be whare I can see you every day and near the place whare I was brought up I shall improve my self as much as I can while I am here.” A year later, when the youth still complained of homesickness, his grandfather reminded him: “You must … not suffer your feelings to impede your progress in your studies—remember that a good education will be invaluable to you when you become a man.”22 Homesickness, Roby and his family believed, was one of the costs of rising in the world, part of learning to delay gratification. The suffering was worth the later profit. The imperatives of the expanding capitalist economy increasingly demanded of young people—especially young, middle-class men—a willingness to leave home, to cope with separation, and to wait for rewards. Hope for the future might offset homesickness in the present.

Adult men moving west often made this emotional bargain. Joel Brown, a California miner, wrote, “I expect that you will think … that I am crying to see my wife. Well suppose I am and what then? I am not the only one that is crying to see the wife and baby.” Indeed, he was not alone; the historian Malcolm J. Rohrbough demonstrated that forty-niners felt both heady optimism and profound homesickness. Other men in the West felt much the same. Charles Preuss, who served as John C. Frémont's cartographer on several expeditions in the 1840s, longed to leave the prairie and return east. He wrote: “To the deuce with such a life; I wish I were in Washington with my old girl.” While the restlessness, individualism, and wanderlust of explorers, miners, and homesteaders have been widely discussed, little has been said of the longing for home that they also felt on their journeys. Homesickness was a cost of opportunity, a cost often acknowledged only privately.23

Middle-class men felt pulled by conflicting emotional and economic imperatives. They were expected to feel bonded to their families, particularly their mothers. Yet as the historian Peter Stearns noted, by the 1840s bourgeois men also needed emotions that would allow them to succeed in the competitive economy.24 They needed to be affectionate and rooted while also ambitious and striving. They needed to love their families but be able to leave them. Both men and women wrestled with their emotions as they confronted economic and social realities that might connect them to a loving family yet might also lead them far from home. For men engaged in capitalist activity, homesickness was a cost of opportunity; for women it often was the price of love and family harmony.

While whites at times moved reluctantly, they exerted at least some control over their migrations. In contrast, African American slaves were uprooted against their will and received little sympathy from the wider culture. Whites often viewed African Americans as more expressive of allegedly cruder emotions but denied that they possessed true emotional sensitivity and doubted that they loved their homes and families enough to experience much pain at separation. In 1804 Henry Tucker took his young slave Bob away from his family in Williamsburg, Virginia, and brought him to Winchester in the northern part of the state. When Tucker discovered Bob missed his mother, he was taken aback. He had been awakened

by a most piteous lamentation. I found it was Bob…. “I was dreaming about my mammy Sir”!!! cried he in a melancholy & still distressed tone. “Gracious God!” thought I, “how ought not I to feel who regarded this child as insensible when compared to those of our complexion.” In truth our thoughts have been starting the same way. How finely woven, how delicately sensible must be those bonds of natural affection which equally adorn the civilized and the savage. The American and the African—nay the man and the Brute!

Other whites would have been equally surprised, for as Harriet Jacobs said of her mistress, “It had never occurred to Mrs. Flint that slaves could have any feelings.” Denying slaves felt homesickness or an abiding affection for their families was part of a larger denial of a shared humanity. 25

Henry Tucker was surprised to discover slaves felt emotions similar to his own; yet there were differences in what they felt—not because of race, but because of power and freedom. Slaves' homesickness was intensified by their lack of control over their own destinies and was a reaction not just to the fact of separation and distance but to their powerlessness in a brutal system. Indeed, they probably felt homesickness more intensely and frequently than free people, for psychologists maintain that those who cannot control their movement experience the feeling more than those who can.26 Of course, slaves expressed a mix of emotions, including anger at the injustice of their situation, despair at their lack of control, and fear about the future, but a recurring theme in narratives of those sold away from their families was homesickness. Unlike whites, particularly white men, who generally left home of their own accord in search of greater opportunity and often in the company of their families, slaves had neither the hope of a brighter future nor the comfort of kin nearby to offset their homesickness.

Solomon Northup, a free man carried into slavery, recalled his emotions as he contemplated his bleak situation. “Thoughts of my family, of my wife and children, continually occupied my mind. When sleep overpowered me, I dreamed of them—dreamed I was again in Saratoga—that I could see their faces, and hear their voices calling me. Awakening from the pleasant phantasms of sleep to the bitter realities around me, I could but groan and weep.” Unlike many other slaves, however, Northup eventually regained his freedom and rejoined his family. Less fortunate were slaves he met in the South. Clem, a slave sold away from his home in Washington, D.C., “was wholly overcome. To him the idea of going south was terrible in the extreme. He was leaving the friends and associations of his youth—every thing that was dear and precious to his heart—in all probability never to return.” In Louisiana Northup came to know homesick slaves; “often they recalled the memories of other days, and sighed to retrace their steps to the old home in Carolina.”27

Like the slaves Northup wrote of, others who told their stories for use in antislavery appeals recalled the disruption and pain of their forced moves. Charles Ball, born in 1781, was sold away from his family in Maryland and transported to South Carolina in his early twenties. Of the separation he wrote, “I was far from the place of my nativity, in a land of strangers, with no one to care for me beyond the care that a master bestows upon his ox; with all my future life one long, waste, barren desert, of cheerless, hopeless, lifeless slavery.” Ball eventually escaped slavery and returned to his family, but in 1830 he was kidnapped and sold to a master in Georgia; upon regaining his freedom and returning home in 1832, he found his wife and children (all born free) had been enslaved.28

Such anecdotes suggest that, despite the hardship and brutality of life on plantations, slaves considered those places home. While there were numerous factors—from slave patrols to the threat of harsh punishment—limiting the numbers who escaped, both Herbert G. Gutman and Drew Gilpin Faust have demonstrated that love of family kept many from fleeing permanently. Gutman has documented the grief that those who escaped often felt as they contemplated their separation from kin and the places they called home. One fugitive, Harriet Jacobs, described the “desolate feeling” she experienced upon finding herself “alone among strangers” in New York. Happy to be away from her oppressive and predatory master, she nonetheless missed those she had left behind, particularly her grandmother, whom she never saw again.29

While the homesickness of blacks and whites, women and men, was prompted by different circumstances and accorded differing degrees of legitimacy, it was a remarkably common sentiment in the nineteenth century, resulting from the social changes of the era—the expansion of slavery, the rise of cities and factories, the growth of capitalism, the opening of the West. When one begins to look for it, traces of homesickness are everywhere, for Americans, particularly white Americans, lived in a culture that encouraged them to express their emotions openly.30 Consequently, they forthrightly discussed their longings for lost places and absent people.

Those longings were reinforced by the larger culture, for the plaintive voices of the homesick were part of a chorus of yearning that seemed to swell in the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, in the face of industrialization and high rates of mobility, laments about the distance from home were commonplace. People moved forward, struggled to climb the class ladder, moved through time, but also reacted against the restlessness of their age, creating a culture that idealized home as the symbol and guarantor of stability and tradition, an object of romantic yearning. The homesick lived in the larger sentimental culture, and in many it reinforced the longings for home. That culture provided them the vocabulary to use in describing their yearnings and often gave their inchoate feelings more concrete shape. This does not mean their homesickness was merely a cultural artifact or social construction; deep pain and sorrow is evident in the plaintive letters sent to the folks at home. Yet such pain was felt in the midst of a culture that both affirmed the longing for home and sustained an optimistic outlook by encouraging the hope of return.

The Cultural Preoccupation with Home

As they migrated from town to town and from class to class, many Americans came to idealize a particular vision of home as counterpoint to the restlessness of their society. The ideal home was an old house, handed down from generation to generation, set in a rural landscape, undisturbed by modern life. Born of the romantic movement's disillusionment with modern, industrializing society, this vision represented a quest for an alternative social and cultural order. It presented an idealized and supposedly ancient form of domestic life; yet despite its evocations of age, it was newly created in the nineteenth century and bore little relation to the way people actually lived in the past. Indeed, the architect and critic Witold Rybczynski argued that the conception of home as a cozy, premodern place, suffused with family love, was an “invented tradition.” That tradition, he noted, “is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation.” In a similar vein, the sociologist Peter Berger suggested that home, with its associated meanings, represents an effort to offset the deracinating effects of modernization.31

The longing for roots in the midst of change was evident in the writings of those who celebrated home. In the 1850s N. Parker Willis, the editor of a popular weekly, the Home Journal, urged Americans to embrace the idealized vision of home as a bulwark against the restlessness of the age

That our plastic and rapidly maturing country would be bettered by a more careful culture of home associations, all must feel who see the facility with which families break up, the readiness with which housekeepers “sell out and furnish new all over,” and the rareness of “old homesteads”—to which the long absent can joyfully return… It is one of those cultures for which poetry and the pulpit might improvingly and patriotically join, for its popularization and promotion.

In Rural Architecture (1852), Lewis Allen claimed Americans had no “attachment to locality”; its absence was “a blemish in our domestic and social constitution” and a sign that the nation had made “little progress in the arts of home embellishment … to repel the temptation so often presented to our enterprise, our ambition, or love of gain … in seeking other and distant places of abode.” With the right architecture, however, Americans might end their wanderings and create permanent, virtuous, and affection-filled homes. 32

This ideal of home life was widely promoted throughout antebellum culture. Architects produced blueprints of perfect houses, domestic advisers such as Catharine Beecher offered tips on how to manage such properties, while novelists from Catharine Sedgwick to Harriet Beecher Stowe celebrated the virtuous lives of their inhabitants. Musicians and lyricists also provided rich portraits of home. John Howard Payne's “Home! Sweet Home!” became one of the most popular songs in nineteenth-century America. Payne wrote it in 1823 in Paris, far from his own family and home, yet he seemed to warn others against similar migrations Likewise, the popular songs of the highly itinerant Stephen Foster presented similar yearnings for idyllic home life.33

‘Mid Pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble there's no place like home; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O, give me my lowly thatched cottage again! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home! Home! sweet, sweet Home! There's no place like Home! there's no place like Home!

Like Payne and Foster, many who most publicly sentimentalized domesticity, including Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the domestic adviser Lydia Maria Child, the architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and the landscape architect Calvert Vaux, spent their lives on the move, away from home, taking part in an industrializing and urbanizing society.34 Their vision was alluring precisely because it stood in contrast to the high rates of residential mobility, the rapidly industrializing society, and the attenuated social ties of antebellum America. For those ambivalent about such changes even as they participated in them, the idea of home became a source of comfort and hope.

Less famous Americans who were on the move also paid homage to the ideal of the stable home. Middle-class households preserved relics of bygone days, compiled scrapbooks, acquired portraits, and constructed quilts. Those treasured objects, which celebrated family unity and permanence, often were gathered or created just as families were splitting apart. They commemorated domestic relationships even as they acknowledged their fragile nature.35

The widely shared desire for a rooted family life in a permanent home also shaped nineteenth-century religious beliefs. American visions of death and heaven reflected profound concerns about separation and deeply held hopes for reunion. Homesick migrants often likened moving away from one's family to dying. Given the difficulties of long-distance travel and communication, the analogy was apt. Those who left and traveled across the prairie or ocean might never see their families again. Lodisa Frizzell, who moved with her family from Illinois to California in 1852, wrote in her journal, “that last separating word Farewell! sinks deeply into the heart. It may be the last we ever hear from some or all of them, and to those who start … there can be no more solemn scene of parting only at death.” Another migrant wrote resignedly that she had “left all my relatives … but such is our lot on earth[,] we are divided.”36

If that was how nineteenth-century Americans perceived the human condition, it was not how they imagined the next life. For centuries, Christians had considered earthly life as exile from God and considered heaven a home to which they would eventually go. Nineteenth-century Protestants built on this belief but also changed it. In response to the Second Great Awakening, and perhaps to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, old-line Protestant groups and some Catholics, as well as new Christian denominations such as the Mormons, came to believe that families would be reconstituted in the hereafter. The historian David E. Stannard observed that this vision arose just as communal and family ties on earth became more fragile. Earlier generations pictured the afterlife as an experience one faced on one's own; nineteenth-century Americans believed that in heaven families would be reunited, even if such a thing was impossible on earth.37

In 1827 Hannah Hobbie, contemplating the distance between them, wrote her cousin, “Separated as we now are, I often ask myself, shall we be separated beyond the grave? Were I assured that we should meet in heaven, I should feel much more reconciled to see you no more below, as I probably never shall.” Two years later, Hobbie displayed a new conviction that heavenly reunions were possible, writing: “This morning my sister, recently married, set out with her husband for the place of their abode at the west, nearly three hundred miles distant…. Little did I know before what it was to part with a beloved sister…. when called to leave this world of sin and sorrow, may we meet where all tears will be wiped away from our eyes; where adieus and farewells are not known.” By the 1830s the hope for heavenly reunion was widespread. Sarah Hodgdon, a mill girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, copied and sent her parents a poem that assured, “Although we are so far apart / if you die there and I die here / before one God we shall apeare.” African American families harbored the same hope: Abream Scriven, a slave sold away from his family, wrote his wife “if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven…. my pen cannot Express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all.”38

Americans dreamed of a time and place where separations and social disruptions would cease. Perhaps an earthly home life could be created that would keep people rooted and serene in the midst of change. Writers and architects sketched the outlines of how such domesticity should look. If that did not succeed in reuniting the scattered and counteracting American rootlessness, perhaps the solution could be found in the hereafter. Nineteenth-century visions of home (a heaven on earth) and heaven (a home in the hereafter) reflected the deep longing for stability and reunion in a world characterized by instability, separation, and innovation. These visions also displayed the strong hope that returning home might still be possible.

Homesickness and the Civil War

The cultural significance of home and the hope for reunion became more manifest during the Civil War, when soldiers and their families felt the pain of separation and confronted the problem of dramatic social and political upheaval. The experience of war crystallized prevailing views of homesickness. Soldiers, steeped in the sentimental culture of the day and confronting hardship and the possibility of death, found that war intensified their longings for home. Doctors, exposed both to such sentimentalism and to the evolving European medical discourse on nostalgia, treated the homesick with more concern than earlier generations of physicians had.

With the coming of the war, the effects of displacement became visible on a grand scale, and the first widespread medical discussions of nostalgia or homesickness in America occurred then.39 During the Civil War, doctors and officers took a gentler approach to the homesick than Washington and his commanders had during the Revolution. The adoption of the word “nostalgia” to describe feelings of homesickness was one sign of the greater legitimacy accorded the condition. While European—particularly French—officials had discussed nostalgia for over a century, it was only during the Civil War that it became a common medical diagnosis in the United States. Perhaps because the emotion was so widespread among soldiers and because they seemed to feel it more intensely than civilians in peacetime, the word and the diagnosis caught on.

Union doctors reported that in the first two years of the war, over 2,500 soldiers suffered from nostalgia and 13 soldiers died of it. In 1863 Assistant Surgeon DeWitt C. Peters described how nostalgia affected Union troops. Young soldiers were most susceptible to nostalgia, which was a form of melancholy. Originating in the mind, its effects were visible in the body. Symptoms included “great mental dejection, loss of appetite, … irregular action of the bowels, and slight hectic fever.” Over time, “it is attended by hysterical weeping, a dull pain in the head, throbbing of the temporal arteries, anxious expression of the face, watchfulness, incontinence of urine, spermatorrhoea, increased hectic fever, and a general wasting of all the vital powers. The disease may … run on into cerebral derangement, typhoid fever, or any epidemic prevailing in the immediate vicinity, and frequently with fatal results.” Another doctor suggested nostalgia might progress from “sadness, unrest, taciturnity, and moodiness,” in the early stages, to “insomnolence, stupor, delirium, prostration, fever, colliquative diarrhoea, and marasmus,” in its final stages.40

According to doctors, camp life fostered the disease. Soldiers far from home eagerly corresponded with their families, and that exacerbated their homesickness. J. Theodore Calhoun, a Union doctor, believed “constant correspondence with home serves to keep vividly before the imagination the home scenes and home ties.” Not just letters triggered the onset of homesickness, however. Some Union bands were forbidden to play “Home! Sweet Home!” or other sentimental songs that might render soldiers melancholic. Such a rule was not frivolous, for Numa Barned, a Union soldier forced to listen to new “home-sick recruits” playing “Home! Sweet Home!” confided, “I don't like to hear it for it makes me feel queer.”41

Calhoun believed that to cure the disease, soldiers must be distracted from memories of home. He suggested, “Battle is to be considered the great curative agent of nostalgia in the field,” for after surviving the onslaught, men developed bonds with their fellow soldiers. Their thoughts gradually lingered less over memories of home and more on the challenges they and their comrades faced. Should battle not help the afflicted, other experiences might. While Calhoun believed homesickness caused physical ailments, it was ultimately an “affection of the mind” and a sign of weakness. “Any influence that will tend to render the patient more manly, will exercise a curative power…. ridicule … will often be found effective in camp…. the patient can often be laughed out of it by his comrades, or reasoned out of it by appeals to his manhood.”42

There were other approaches to curing nostalgia. The writer, abolitionist, and Union officer Thomas Wentworth Higginson described a “convalescent camp” in Saint Augustine, Florida, “whither they send homesick officers to cure them by contraries—getting them farther from home.” More serious cases might be resolved only by sending patients home. A medical manual suggested that in the early stages, “a furlough … will often suffice to restore the moral vigor of the young soldier. But when it has long resisted treatment, and gone so far as to produce sensible external lesions … or structural changes in large organs, a discharge must unquestionably, be granted.”43

Not only did doctors and officers write sympathetically of the condition, but soldiers themselves often freely admitted to being homesick. It was not yet so shameful an emotion that it must be hidden. Indeed, given the nineteenth-century obsession with home, a soldier's love for it, if displayed appropriately, reflected a virtuous character and indicated the possession of correct moral sentiments. Soldiers wrote openly of their longing for home in letters and diaries. Not all suffered as intensely as those admitted to army hospitals with the condition, but a distinct melancholy pervaded soldiers' writings when they turned to the subject of home. Cyrus F. Boyd, a soldier from Iowa, concluded, “More men die of homesickness than all other diseases—and when a man gives up and lies down he is a goner.” In 1863 Col. Nathan W. Daniels lamented, “Home, what sweetness in the name, but when shall I have the pleasure of enjoying its many blessings again, when shall I look upon the loved ones who are dearer to me far than life.”44

During the Civil War soldiers openly displayed their homesickness, and doctors responded with a mix of sympathy and impatience. Shaped by a culture that ceaselessly celebrated domestic life, army doctors and commanders demonstrated a greater empathy with the homesick than had officers during the Revolution. After all, during the Revolution the romantic ideal of home had not yet been fully articulated in America, nor had the European understanding of homesickness taken root. In contrast, during the Civil War, soldiers and officers placed great importance on home life and home ties. Indeed, the emotions most acceptable for men to express in the nineteenth century were those connected to “mother love.”45 Consequently, homesick troops, longing for hearth and home, mothers and wives, received more care and attention than they had before or would in the future.

A New View Emerges, 1865–1945

The Civil War represented a dividing moment in the history of homesickness and nostalgia. During the war, homesickness was taken most seriously and accorded legitimacy. Thereafter, sympathy for the homesick gradually decreased. The war and the changes that came in its wake also produced nostalgia, an emotion that came to be recognized as a distinct feeling only at the turn of the century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Americans felt a strong desire to return home, but some began to doubt that true return was possible. Whereas antebellum Americans harbored hopes that a country house might lead to domestic stability or that families might be rejoined in heaven, many in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw home as impossibly far away. The transcontinental railroad and steam-powered ocean liners made it easier to return to a physical home and thus, at least theoretically, easier to assuage homesickness. But upon traveling back, many Americans found they had not arrived and never could. While space could be traversed, time could not. This realization was at the heart of nostalgia.

Some historians, most notably Peter Fritzsche, have suggested that this sense of the unrecoverability of times past developed earlier as a result of the political upheavals of the eighteenth century. It seems clear that in the United States, however, the sense that return was impossible came more gradually, gaining wide acceptance only in the wake of the Civil War, massive immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. The sociologist Fred Davis suggested nostalgia springs from just such transformations: “in its collective manifestations nostalgia also thrives … on the rude transitions rendered by history, on the discontinuities and dislocations wrought by such phenomena as war, depression, civil disturbance, and cataclysmic natural disasters—in short, those events that cause masses of people to feel uneasy and to wonder whether the world and their being are quite what they always took them to be.” The historian T. J. Jackson Lears argued that during the late nineteenth century such worries were widespread, as many felt uncomfortable with the emerging contours of modern American society and harbored skepticism about the vaunted ideals of progress and individualism. Michael Kammen likewise noted that at the turn of the century, there was a “strong sense of discontinuity” and a “nostalgia induced by swift change.”46

In that era, then, nostalgia came to be recognized as distinct from homesickness. It was no accident that nostalgia slowly gained recognition just as sympathy for homesickness was on the decline. To take homesickness—and the homesick—seriously required a belief that it was realistic and possible to return home. Many concluded, however, that return was unlikely; the present and future were so different from the past that home as individuals remembered it no longer existed. The hope for reunion—either on earth on in heaven—that had consoled earlier generations, was fading away in a secularizing society. The loss of home, the necessity of movement, and the impossibility of return were becoming facts of life, but accepting the facts was painful. Consequently, for this generation of Americans, nostalgia probably was a more intense emotional state than it is today.

The records left behind by immigrants and internal migrants offer a window on how Americans reconciled themselves to being uprooted from home and from the past. Many felt the acute pain of homesickness with its built-in desire to return home; others, recognizing return was impossible, experienced nostalgia, although few save psychologists called it that. Sometimes homesickness became nostalgia, as individuals gradually abandoned dreams of return. Both feelings occasioned sadness; both were symptoms of individuals' adjustment to new circumstances.

Immigrants offer powerful examples of individuals confronting change. Some welcomed life in the United States, some harbored mixed feelings, some never overcame the trauma of separation. There were countless variations, for between 1871 and 1920, 20 million immigrants, the majority from southern and eastern Europe, arrived in America. Because travel from one continent to another became easier in the late nineteenth century—steamship fares from Europe to America fell 50 percent between 1860 and 1880, while travel time was reduced from four to six weeks at the start of the nineteenth century to seven days by its end—many realized only belatedly how profoundly their lives had changed, how dramatic a break they had made with their pasts.47

Those who landed on American shores with hopes of finding greater opportunity often found it difficult to be far from home. Indeed, for many, the lure of home proved irresistible. Ida Lindgren, who emigrated from Sweden to Manhattan, Kansas, in 1870, kept up a steady and plaintive correspondence with her family back in Skåne. In 1871 she wrote her sister: “I so often dream that I am home with you and I weep so much with joy that I awaken. Shall I ever be able to weep these tears of joy awake? Farewell, may the Lord watch over all my dear ones in the old homeland.” Perhaps displaying the influence of her countryman Emanuel Swedenborg, she described her hopes for the hereafter: “May he bring us all together in His true homeland, there not to shed tears but to sing songs of joy. Oh, were we but there!” Eventually, in 1881, unwilling to wait for a heavenly reunion, Lindgren returned permanently to Sweden. She was not atypical. Of the immigrants who came to America between 1870 and 1914, perhaps a third or more returned home—some permanently, others for periodic visits. Rates of return varied—from an estimated 56 percent of southern Italians to 30 percent of Danes to 4.3 percent of eastern European Jews. Some studies indicated that homesickness was the primary cause of reverse migration. The ability to go back home set this generation of immigrants apart from earlier ones, who, before the advent of cheap steamboat travel, often found it difficult to return to their native lands and assuage their homesickness.48

Those who stayed on produced an immense literature, laced through with a thick thread of homesickness, albeit a thread often intertwined with other, pleasanter emotions. As a scholar of Scandinavian immigration noted, “Homesickness was indeed the most prominent and typical feeling expressed throughout all periods of Scandinavian-American literature. One who has read through acres of newspaper verse can safely hazard the guess that at least three-fourths of it dealt exclusively with nostalgia…. More than any other theme, this pervaded the emotional lives of this group in spite of pride and gratitude for their social betterment.”49

In letters home, immigrants discussed their homesickness as well as their hopes for a bright future in their new country. Emma Huhtasaari, a Swedish Finn, emigrated in 1903 and settled in Hancock, Michigan, a mining and factory town. After two years in America, she still missed home and her old way of life. She wrote her mother: “When it gets to be summer one's thoughts go like this to the lovely summers of the North. Nothing can be compared with that beauty…. Here … you don't see such pretty little islands and meadows filled with flowers. There is only coal smoke and dusty streets. Coal smoke from many factories so that the air gets heavy. It feels so bad when you have grown up in Norrland's fresh air.” She continued to miss home, although she realized life in America had its virtues. She wrote in 1909: “Ever-beloved Mother, far away in the dear homeland, I always think of Mother and tears come to my eyes when I think that the seventh year has begun since I left the dear home of my birth. I am not so attached to America that I should forget the homeland. One always feels such a strange longing. Though now I have it very good.”50

Other immigrants offered similarly mixed evaluations of their new home: Barbro Ramseth, born in 1838 in Tynset, Norway, emigrated to the United States in 1888. He wrote from Wisconsin to his father in 1888, “My often remembered dear old Father, … I often think of Tynset, and of you, then I long for home, but now, thank goodness, things are much better. I am fully convinced that it was best for us to come over here, for our experience shows that it is easier to earn money here, and fight our way through, but it is a painful process, many losses for a newcomer.” Such letters carried in them a mix of emotions and motives. They displayed immigrants' longings for home but might also reveal their guilt at having left in pursuit of personal gain and advancement. Homesickness might express fidelity to lifeways and family relationships, even as individuals sought new social status and opportunities.51

Immigrants did more than express their conflicting emotions in letters and diaries; they also created a culture that connected them to the places they missed. While returning home was sometimes impossible, re-creating a sense of home was easier. In ethnic enclaves, homesickness took on a communal face, as immigrants found others from their native lands who also felt the difficulty of adjusting. To maintain a bond with past places and selves, immigrants founded ethnic groceries, churches, libraries, veterans' organizations, fraternal groups, and newspapers. Those varied institutions offered familiar tastes, sounds, and rituals.52 Many were established by individuals from the same town or region. They allowed homesick immigrants to band together and recollect the past communally, but they also helped them pursue economic advancement. A German newspaper published in Chicago, the Abendpost, described how immigrants relied on such organizations. After the initial years of “gnawing homesickness,” immigrants became “acclimatized,” as

their adopted country shared its wealth and freedom with them…. But still they carried the memories of their old home town in their hearts. In their “Schwaben Verein” [clubs for natives of Swabia], in their “guilds,” in Singing Societies or “Turner-Vereins” [gymnastic clubs], in German churches with German Pastors and with the harmony of German church songs, they found, in the city, as well as in the rural districts, their little old home village again.

These associations soothed homesickness and provided a sense of the familiar as immigrants created new identities. 53

Frequently it was fraternal organizations that crystalized immigrants' sense of nationality. As the historian John Bodnar noted, over time small, locally based fraternal organizations became affiliated with national organizations. Through them, immigrants who previously felt allegiance to a village or region became aware of themselves as part of a national group. Often, foreign governments collaborated with fraternal organizations to keep alive a connection and sense of obligation to home among immigrant populations. Such organizations tried to tie memories of the family house and native village to memories of the larger nation.54

The connections between nationalism and homesickness were evident in many of these groups' activities. Organizations frequently invoked the idea of a common past, a shared blood, and a bond to the soil of a distant land. For example, in 1922 a Chicago immigrant group, the Ceskoslovenská Národní Rada v Americe (Czechoslovak National Council in America) tried to foster support for Czechoslovakia, a new nation created in the wake of World War I that incorporated diverse ethnic groups. The organization attempted to bridge such differences as it called upon “all the Czechoslovaks of Chicago and vicinity, regardless of their political or religions affiliations, to attend a festival in which an urn, containing the sacred soil of places very dear to all of us will be received…. The shipment … was accompanied by the following letter: ‘May you, our brothers, … be inspired whenever you look upon this urn. May the secret whispers of the symbolism of these three clods of native earth become audible to you.’” In the same year, another Czech organization in Chicago sponsored a trip back to Czechoslovakia. Describing the journey, an officer of the organization mixed memories of home with references to the nation:

In a few days you will be on your way to the land where your cradle stood, the land which you left … while still young…. You may consider yourselves lucky to have the opportunity of seeing the thresholds of your native homes, to look at the roofs under which you spent your childhood days …. many of you will still find under the same roofs your aged fathers and careworn mothers who will clasp you in their embrace and tell you about their sorrows and their pleasures while you dwelt abroad. Only a few days more and you will see that dear beloved homeland.

The speaker associated the intimate and familiar details of home life with the national life. As one historian has observed, “hearth and home, rather than sceptre and sword,” came to symbolize national identities. Such ceremonies and expeditions excited feelings of sentimentality and homesickness, endowing them with a public and communal meaning. Irish, Italians, Slovenes, Greeks, Hungarians—all developed a bond not just to their homes but to their nations while living in the United States. Even east European Jews fleeing oppression sometimes romanticized, not just their families, but the lands they had left. Nationalism grew in the fertile soil of memory and longing. 55

Memory and longing, however, sometimes proved unreliable. Many immigrants went home for visits after years away, but not all came back satisfied. They were disillusioned because neither their homelands nor their homes were as they had remembered them. In 1920 Marcus Eli Ravage, a Romanian immigrant, and his French wife decided to visit their childhood homes. Ravage wrote: “As for the old place, why it was the one thing in all the world I wanted to see. It was the thought that some day I would go back that had kept me alive. Only I had been dreaming of it so long that the craving had come to seem more agreeable than the realization. To return to Rumania was like going to heaven.” Ravage and his wife, however, were disillusioned by their visits home. What they found did not match their memories. Returning to his village, Ravage discovered that his brightest classmate, never having moved, lived an impoverished and unstimulating life. Ravage concluded his move had been for the best and described a final interaction in America that captured his new attitude. He asked the man who shined his shoes, “'Why don't you go home for a while? Aren't you homesick for Italy?’ ‘No, sir’ said Tony with conviction. ‘No Italy for me. No good there. America fine enough for me.’ ‘You are a wise man, Tony,’ said I, ‘and you've got a better memory than I have.’” Ravage had been homesick for a home that no longer existed or perhaps never had.56

Ravage realized what many immigrants who journeyed home learned—true return was impossible. The yearning for home could not be cured merely by conquering space; time must be conquered as well, and it could not be vanquished. Emma Matko Planinsek, who migrated from Slovenia in 1921, reached that conclusion while visiting her native village after many years' absence: “I was home again, visiting and speaking endlessly with people, who were part of my past, … but at the same time realizing with each passing day, that I was no longer tied to my homeland as I had imagined. My heart, which had carried the weight of loneliness for four decades, suddenly was lightened and relieved from fantasies of what might have been.” Planinsek observed, “It was evident how much Trbovlje had changed; how much I had changed, and how impossible it was to go back in time and expect everything to be the way I had left it.” The realization that she was separated from her childhood home not just by distance, but by time, cured her of her homesickness. “Those early years in Trbovlje and Zagreb became cherished memories of a beautiful but distant youth. America—my new home—was my real home. My roots were firmly transplanted from the ‘old country’ to the ‘new country.’ My heart was now at peace.” Her painful homesickness finally had been replaced by nostalgia, as she realized that true return was impossible. That realization was a hallmark of modern consciousness.57

Immigrants were not the only ones trying to conquer homesickness, putting their pasts and their homes behind them, and moving on. Native-born Americans did the same. At the turn of the century, the rural migration from farms and small towns to cities left many with a sense of dislocation. In 1880, 71 percent of the population was rural; by 1930 only 43 percent was. Individuals who made the transition to urban life testified to the accompanying emotional strain. Buoyed by great expectations for their futures, they also experienced homesickness. The lawyer Clarence Darrow, who moved from Ohio to Chicago in 1888, recalled his difficult days in his new city: “From the very first a cloud of homesickness always hung over me. There is no place so lonely to a young man as a great city where he has not intimates or companions.” So lonesome was he for home that wherever he went, “I scanned every face I met to see if I could not perchance discover some one from Ohio. Sometimes I would stand on the corner of Madison and State Streets—‘Chicago's busiest corner’—watching the passers by for some familiar face.” The writer Hamlin Garland, living in Boston far from his midwestern family home, likewise wrote of the “homesickness at my own heart.” Eventually, however, Darrow and Garland overcame their homesickness, adapted to their new surroundings, and flourished. They put home and the past behind them.58

Many Americans learned to move on but still longed for what they had left and mourned that they could not get it back. Nostalgia was an intense emotion in this era of change, as individuals adjusted to dramatic and irreversible transformations wrought by industrialization, urbanization, and mass migration. Nostalgia's power and pervasiveness was visible in the reaction to Thomas Hovenden's painting Breaking Home Ties, displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Huge crowds flocked to see the painting, which portrayed a son setting off from his country home, presumably in search of opportunity. One observer reported the area where the painting was displayed was “always jammed, and always will be till … the very last minute visitors are allowed in.” Another claimed, “no picture ever painted in America … came so near to the common life of the common people. Strong men bared their heads and women wept before it.” Thousands of reproductions circulated across the nation.59 Viewers responded to the painting because it portrayed leave-takings they themselves had made. It caught the moment of change, when the past and home were left behind and the future embraced. The fascination and weeping the painting provoked suggest that while Americans were becoming resigned to movement and change, they still found it difficult to make such mental and emotional adjustments.

Even as they pushed forward, Americans often tried to recapture a sense of home and the past. Some moved to romantic suburbs that sprang up across the United States in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Such suburbs embodied nostalgia for a simple, rural life; the people who moved to them were generally the affluent who were flourishing in the new economy and society—those who had learned to embrace change and break home ties. Other prosperous families tried to reestablish roots by visiting places that seemed like home had been or should be. Vacations on Vermont farms or Nantucket island offered a way to return to an idealized home and an earlier form of life. These rural idylls became a substitute for the often impractical, if not impossible, return to an actual home, allowing uprooted individuals to feel connected to old identities.60

Some migrants actually revisited their childhood houses, but they too found that true return was impossible. At the turn of the twentieth century, several New England towns hosted “old home week” festivals designed to lure former residents. The New England Magazine extolled such festivals in 1906:

Think what it would mean … if they could come back to their old home in the east in a fast-flying train of Pullman cars and find their townsmen waiting to receive them with open arms and brass bands, decorations, street parades, public meetings and banquets. There would be a note of sadness in it all, perhaps, for the changes in the place would be marked and the vacant chairs many; but the joy of friendly reunion would be the dominant key-note, after all, and the visitors from the far west would go back again feeling that the old home ties had never really been sundered.

The journalist admitted that when migrants returned home, some could find no familiar faces; others saw dramatic changes. They had, after all, left in wagons and returned in pullman cars. 61 Although such old-timers as Emma Matko Planinsek, Marcus Ravage, and countless others could rely on the fast, reliable transportation of the day to take them home, they often came away from such visits with a new realization that what separated them was not just space, but time, experience, and social class. Both they and their homes had changed.

New technologies that made it easier to travel across space made it clear that time could not be reversed. When earlier generations had set off across the prairies in wagons, their thoughts of home often remained unchallenged by visits back. They could hold on to memories of home as it had been. When they returned on pullman cars or fast-moving ocean liners, when travel became easier, many came to realize that they had left behind an era, not just a place. By making return easier, new technologies of travel may have reduced homesickness but increased nostalgia. Because they could go home again physically, many came to recognize that in another sense they could never return. They had no choice but to leave home, and the past, behind.

While individuals made such discoveries for themselves, the larger culture reinforced them. Those far from home learned they should master their homesickness because it threatened individual and social progress. Homesickness, after all, carried in it the temptation to try to return home. In contrast, nostalgia, admitting a sense of its own futility, was less disruptive, offering a way to establish connections with the past that did not seriously undermine the present. Individuals could look backward nostalgically, but ultimately they must be willing to leave home and move forward. Progress came with movement; to stay put was to reject opportunity.

Doctors and psychologists reinforced that view. Increasingly, they discussed homesickness strictly as a mental condition, rather than a physical one, and implied that as such, sufferers could control it. There were, to be sure, doctors who continued to treat homesickness as a physical disease, such as E. S. Corson, who worried it might take its toll on U.S. troops occupying the Philippines and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, or J. W. Bovee, who believed it had caused a young female immigrant to become partially paralyzed and to stop menstruating. Gradually, however, other views of the emotion gained power and popularity. In 1899 the psychologist Linus W. Kline suggested, “To get on in this new world new adjustments must be made, old brain paths must be dropped and new ones formed.” Unfortunately, many homesick people never adjusted to their environments, “but rather yield[ed] passively to their prison-world with wonder, timidity and fear.” Overly dependent on home, “provincial, plodding and timid,” these people were doomed to inferior positions in society. “The lover of home” was destined to be “the world's hod-carrier. His interests are identified with the conservative and microscopic affairs of society.” In contrast, “the migrant is cosmopolitan, has manifold interests, and finds profitable objects and kindred spirits in a variety of situations. He may be found in the commercial, speculative, daring, progressive, macroscopic interests of the world.”62

This idea that one had to leave home to succeed was a harbinger of the modern sensibility that embraced movement and change as positive goods with few costs. Such an outlook began to take root in the nineteenth century, but it became more firmly established among both psychologists and the general population in the early twentieth. It gained support from the increasing acceptance of a Darwinian perspective that considered mobility and competition as natural traits and elements of success. According to that view, those unable to cope with the pain of parting were doomed to failure. This view was also consistent with the behaviorist principles of psychology that became popular in the 1920s. Behaviorists believed fears could be overcome through behavior modification and education. Children must learn to manage their emotions; maturity was defined by the ability to master particular feelings through conditioning.63

Many psychologists therefore advised parents to teach their children to overcome homesickness. In Principles of Adolescent Psychology (1935), Edmund S. Conklin argued that ambitious young people frequently left home and became homesick. They should not return home, however, for that would undermine their goal in leaving and subject them to shame in their communities. Instead, they should work hard. Work would distract them from their homesickness, and they would achieve what they had set out to accomplish, thereby shoring up their sense of self. Conklin suggested parents should prepare children for such inevitable—and ultimately desirable—separations. “Through an early training in independence and self-reliance, through much changing about, through occasional absences from home at summer camps … through a careful avoidance of that excess of petting and coddling which develops parental fixations, the conflicts which produce homesickness with all of its distressing effects might be avoided.”64 That view stood in contrast to the nineteenth-century belief that individuals should cultivate an attachment to home and family in order to stave off the restlessness and mobility of American society. By the twentieth century, few seemed to believe it was possible to stay put; better then to prepare for parting.

The need for such preparation increased during World War II as millions were deployed away from home. During the war, physicians examined soldiers like those Ernie Pyle encountered who were “isolated and homesick” and prone to mental breakdowns. In 1943 navy doctors, still employing the older meaning of the word, observed that “nostalgia is a constant problem in any military training center receiving men in the first days of their service.” Luckily, the problem was easily solved and “open to simple therapy.” Doctors David Flicker and Paul Weiss believed homesickness was almost universal in the army as well. Those who suffered extreme pain from it were few in number, however, and Flicker and Weiss considered them emotionally immature. “Induction into military service,” they wrote, “calls for an emotional emancipation from adolescent and infantile ties. It requires mature emotionality. If too great a dependency on home or on any member of the family is present, psychic and somatic difficulties often arise.” Homesickness was a sign of immaturity and, the doctors believed, a “weakling emotion.” Those most prone to it were poorly adjusted to the demands of modern life, but if offered “kindly attention,” they would become reconciled to the necessity of leaving home. Those immune to homesickness were, in contrast, “the most social, the most educated and the most intelligent persons” with “the most adaptability.” Unlike the homesick, they were equipped for success.65

Homesickness in Modern America

The new orthodoxy, made clearest in wartime but pervasive throughout American society, was that a cosmopolitan sensibility, rather than a homebound one, was necessary for the modern individual. The attitude was nurtured by the spread of transportation technologies that, as they made travel easier, seemed to make distance disappear. Between 1940 and 1970 the number of cars in the United States increased threefold. By 1970 the number of autos exceeded the number of households.66 After the introduction of the jet plane in the late 1950s, air travel became faster and gradually less expensive. With the rise of affordable long-distance service, telephone wires also linked migrants to their homes. Leaving home and returning to it became easier, and parting seemed a less consequential act. To some, homesickness appeared to be a pain that might be easily assuaged.

Consequently, many believed that homesickness was no longer a significant psychological problem. It still denoted a longing for home, but the term became increasingly associated with children rather than adults, designating a problem easily solved through early intervention and training. Simultaneously, nostalgia's new meaning, as the bittersweet yearning for a lost time, became ensconced in popular parlance. Expressions of that emotion were visible throughout American culture, particularly after the 1970s. Yet while nostalgia was increasingly accepted, many overt expressions of homesickness were suppressed.

Psychiatrists and psychologists reiterated the importance of conquering homesickness during childhood. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm), published in 1952, made no mention of homesickness, but succeeding editions discussed it as the failure of children to separate from their families. The second (1968) edition described children who were apprehensive in new surroundings as suffering from an “overanxious reaction of childhood.” The third (1980) edition used the phrase “separation anxiety” to describe “excessive anxiety on separation from major attachment figures or from home,” while the fourth (1994) edition noted: “Some individuals become extremely homesick and uncomfortable to the point of misery…. They may yearn to return home and be preoccupied with reunion fantasies.” Such homesick children were generally from “close-knit” families. In the modern age, where mobility and leave-taking had become commonplace, close familial bonds supposedly impeded the proper socialization of children.67

More popular works brought these concepts to the wider public. Dr. Benjamin Spock listed separation anxiety as a problem in the 1957 edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, warning that if parents were overprotective, their children would be overdependent. Too much love and closeness were counterproductive. In 1985 Spock urged parents to force fearful children to go to school, for “it's better for the child to outgrow dependence than to give in to it.” The 1998 edition suggested that the “basic aim” of parents and teachers “is to help the child separate from home and adjust to school and the outside world.” A chief goal of modern child rearing was to produce individuals accustomed to independence, mobility, and change.68

From Good Housekeeping, Prevention, and Parents' Magazine, parents learned what to do if their children felt homesick when away from home: send care packages and letters, call (but not too often), and provide children with icebreakers that might make them popular with peers in their new surroundings. Magazines addressed to adolescents offered a parallel stream of advice to young people at risk of homesickness. Seventeen Magazine told sufferers: “Talk it out,” “Admit you're homesick,” “Bring familiar items,” “Start your new life,” “Keep in touch with family and friends,” and “Stick it out.”69

Storybooks familiarized younger children with the idea of leaving home. In Arthur Goes to Camp, Arthur is unhappy at camp. He begs his parents to bring him home, but when he becomes involved with camp activities, he finds himself happy in his new surroundings. In I Want to Go Home, Big Bird leaves Sesame Street to visit his grandmother. He becomes homesick, but his grandmother keeps him busy and his homesickness begins to abate, finally lifting when he makes a new friend. Such stories reassured children that leaving home was natural and need not be painful. One could be happy anywhere.70

The focus on homesickness in children was simultaneous with the virtual neglect of it in adults. While there is plentiful evidence that uprooted adults feel homesick, for the past fifty years, mental health experts generally have overlooked the condition. As the psychologists M. A. L. Van Tilburg, A. J. J. M. Vingerhoets, and G. L. Van Heck noted in 1996, “after World War II the interest in the phenomenon disappeared almost completely.” In consequence, scholarship on homesickness was “rather slim and scattered.” Of the scholarly literature on adult homesickness, much examined the emotion in immigrant populations; it less frequently attended to the pain caused by internal migration.71

Today, homesickness persists—yet even the homesick themselves resist the label. Recent psychological research demonstrates that homesick individuals are reluctant to admit to the feeling because they perceive it as socially undesirable and fear that others regard the homesick negatively. Such findings reflect modern attitudes toward mobility. Moving on is now considered a painless, natural activity. Those who feel grief at parting hide the emotion, believing it a sign of immaturity, maladjustment, and weakness. Instead of displaying homesickness, Americans express hopefulness and cheerfulness, two attributes much valued in American society. Trepidations about breaking home ties must be subordinated to sunny hopes for the future.72

Americans, particularly those in the middle class, have internalized the dictates that require them to conquer homesickness. While many feel the emotion, few would leave work or school because of the feeling; to do so would signify weakness and failure. Yet they sometimes express the emotion in other, less disruptive ways. They make do with what they can. Foreign immigrants and internal migrants surround themselves with a variety of consumer goods—from tamales and tortillas to sushi and soul food—that remind them of home. Advertising campaigns encourage such purchases; if homesickness is deemed a flaw when it disrupts the flow of a mobile labor market, it is tolerated when it prompts consumer spending.

So too with nostalgia. At the turn of the century, it caused pain, as people only gradually became accustomed to a tempo of change so rapid and inexorable that it made the past utterly different from the present, but today Americans take the fast pace of change for granted. The past is past, and by and large, contemporary Americans do not believe it is possible to return to it, nor do they mourn it, as earlier generations did. Peter Fritzsche has labeled such a jaunty attitude “nostalgia without melancholy.” Americans still yearn for lost times, for a sense of home in a world that is changing, but they also realize that a true home is elusive. Acting on feelings of nostalgia, they try to fashion a home in a new location and a new era from the materials at hand. Consumer culture provides contemporary Americans, particularly middle-class ones, with the tokens of home and roots. These are not mementos of their actual homes so much as items associated with the romantic image of home, first created in the nineteenth century, that many contemporary Americans still cherish. The old-fashioned architecture and rustic home furnishings that have gained popularity over the last quarter century, for instance, offer a feeling of connection and history, an illusion of timelessness and permanence, even when one is far from home both in time and in place. Similarly, heritage festivals, living history museums, and historical reenactments have gained popularity in the late twentieth century because many rely on them to assuage feelings that David Lowenthal described—“isolation and dislocation of self from family, family from neighborhood, neighborhood from nation, and even oneself from one's former selves.” To those living through change, nostalgic home goods, even if they are reproductions, and nostalgic history parks, even if they offer commercialized reenactments, provide comfort and a connection to the past. That contemporary Americans are willing to accept such re-created and reproduced objects and events, however, betrays their consciousness that the actual past, and one's true home, are gone for good.73

References

1 Wolfe Thomas You Can't Go Home Again , 1940 New York 2 Hesiod Works and Days , Hesiod and Theognis , 1986 New York (pg. 61 - 64 ) (pg. 3 Hofer Johannes Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia , Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine , 1934 Aug. , vol. 2 (pg. 376 - 91 ) , vol.(pg. 4 Kline Linus W. The Migratory Impulse vs. Love of Home , American Journal of Psychology , 1898 Oct. , vol. 10 (pg. 76 - 77 ) , vol.(pg. 5 Davis Fred Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia , 1979 New York pg. 4 pg. 6 Boym Future of Nostalgia pg. xiv pg. 16 pg.pg. 7 Starobinski Jean The Idea of Nostalgia , Diogenes , 1966 Summer, vol. 14 pg. 81 Summer, vol.pg. 8 Johnson Edward Jameson J. Franklin Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England, 1628–1651 , 1910 New York pg. 45 pg. 9 Printz Johan Myers Albert Cook Report of Governor Johan Printz, 1644 , Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–1707 , 1959 New York pg. 109 pg. 10 Gillis John A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values , 1996 New York (pg. 15 - 16 )pg. 32 (pg.)pg. 11 Farish Hunter Dickinson The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, 1773–1774 , 1957 Williamsburg (pg. 23 - 24 ) (pg. 12 Zwingmann ‘Heimweh’ or ‘Nostalgic Reaction,’ pg. 80 pg. 13 Bowman Morale of the American Revolutionary Army (pg. 77 - 92 ) (pg. 14 Starobinski Idea of Nostalgia (pg. 95 - 96 ) (pg. 15 Appleby Joyce Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans , 2000 Cambridge, Mass. pg. 23 pg. 16 Feller Daniel The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840 , 1995 Baltimore 17 Degler Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present , 1980 New York (pg. 41 - 46 ) (pg. 18 Wall Roxana Born Losers: A History of Failure in America , 2005 Cambridge, Mass. pg. 72 pg. 19 Schlissel Lillian Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey , 1982 , vol. 6 New York (pg. 28 - 30 )pg. 14 , vol.(pg.)pg. 20 Welter Barbara The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860 , American Quarterly , 1966 Summer, vol. 18 (pg. 151 - 74 ) Summer, vol.(pg. 21 Somerville James Homesick in Upstate New York: The Saga of Sidney Roby, 1843–1847 , New York History , 1991 Apr. , vol. 72 (pg. 178 - 96 ) , vol.(pg. 22 Somerville James Homesick in Upstate New York: The Saga of Sidney Roby, 1843–1847 , New York History , 1991 Apr. , vol. 72 (pg. 178 - 96 ) , vol.(pg. 23 Frederico Bianca Morse Brown Myrtle Gold Rush: The Letters of Joel and Ann Brown, 1852, 1854–55 pg. 118 pg. 24 Ryan Cradle of the Middle Class pg. 234 pg. 25 Hammond William A. A Treatise on Insanity in its Medical Relations , 1973 New York pg. 413 pg. 26 Fisher Shirley Homesickness, Cognition, and Health , 1989 London (pg. 68 - 69 ) (pg. 27 Northup Solomon Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City, in 1841 and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana , 1970 New York (pg. 47 - 48 )(pg. 56 - 57 )pg. 186 (pg.)(pg.)pg. 28 Ball Charles Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave , 1971 Detroit pg. 115 pg. 29 Gutman Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (pg. 263 - 67 ) (pg. 30 Stearns American Cool pg. 20 pg. 31 Bushman Richard The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities , 1992 New York pg. 108 pg. 110 pg. 137 pg. 229 pg.pg.pg.pg. 32 Willis N. Parker The Rag-Bag: A Collection of Ephemera , 1855 New York pg. 101 pg. 36 pg.pg. 33 Payne John Howard Bishop Henry Rowley Jackson Richard Home! Sweet Home! , Popular Songs of Nineteenth-Century America: Complete Original Sheet Music for Sixty-four Songs , 1976 New York (pg. 80 - 82 ) (pg. 34 Sklar Kathryn Kish Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity , 1976 New York 35 Gillis World of Their Own Making (pg. 71 - 80 ) (pg. 36 Jeffrey Frontier Women pg. 37 pg. 31 pg.pg. 37 Brandt Anthony A Short Natural History of Nostalgia , Atlantic Monthly , 1978 Dec. , vol. 242 (pg. 58 - 59 ) , vol.(pg. 38 Armstrong Robert G. Memoir of Hannah Hobbie; or, Christian Activity, and Triumph in Suffering , 1837 New York (pg. 142 - 43 )pg. 30 (pg.)pg. 39 Rush Benjamin Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind , 1962 New York pg. 40 pg. 41 pg. 113 pg.pg.pg. 40 Flint Austin Contributions relating to the Causation and Prevention of Disease, And To Camp Diseases Together with A Report of the Diseases, Etc., Among the Prisoners at Andersonville, Ga. , Sanitary Memoirs of the War of the Rebellion , 1867 New York pg. I pg. 21 pg.pg. 41 Calhoun J. Theodore Nostalgia, As a Disease of Field Service , Medical and Surgical Reporter , 1864 Feb. 27 (pg. 130 - 32 ) (pg. 42 Calhoun Nostalgia (pg. 130 - 32 ) (pg. 43 Looby Christopher Thomas Wentworth Higginson journal, Nov. 6, 1863 , The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson , 2000 Chicago (pg. 171 - 72 ) (pg. 44 Mitchell Vacant Chair pg. 12 pg. 45 Stearns American Cool (pg. 36 - 37 ) (pg. 46 Fritzsche Specters of History pg. 1589 pg. 47 Nugent Walter Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 , 1992 Bloomington (pg. 31 - 33 )pg. 45 (pg.)pg. 48 Barton H. Arnold Ida Lindgren to her sister, Feb. 9, 1871 , Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840–1914 , 1975 Minneapolis (pg. 149 - 52 )pg. 143 (pg.)pg. 49 Skardal Dorothy Burton The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience through Literary Sources , 1974 Lincoln pg. 264 pg. 50 Barton Emma Huhtasaari to her mother, May 1, 1905, April 5, 1909 , Letters from the Promised Land pg. 236 pg. 237 pg.pg. 51 Zempel Solveig Barbro Ramseth to his father, Nov. 6, 1888 , In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants , 1991 Minneapolis pg. 102 pg. 104 pg.pg. 52 Cohen Lizabeth Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 , 1990 New York (pg. 11 - 158 ) (pg. 53 Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project and Illinois Works Projects Administration Abendpost (Chicago), June 22, 1929 , The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, 1936–1941 54 Bodnar Transplanted pg. 53 pg. 128 pg.pg. 55 Festival to Commemorate the Bringing of the Soil of Czechoslovakia to Chicago , Denní Hlasatel , 1922 Nov. 16 Chicago 56 Ravage Marcus Eli Our Sentimental Pilgrimage , Saturday Evening Post , 1923 Mar. 17 pg. 4 pg. 57 Odorizzi Irene M. Planinsek Footsteps through Time , 1978 Arlington pg. 30 pg. 58 Kolb J. H. Edmund de Schweinitz Brunner, and William Fielding Ogburn , A Study of Rural Society: Its Organization and Changes , 1940 Boston pg. 206 pg. 59 Burns Sarah The Country Boy Goes to the City: Thomas Hovenden's Breaking Homes Ties in American Popular Culture , American Art Journal , 1988 , vol. 20 4 pg. 60 , vol.pg. 60 Jackson Crabgrass Frontier (pg. 73 - 86 ) (pg. 61 Anderson Thomas F. ‘Old-Home Week’ in New England , New England Magazine , 1906 Aug. , vol. 34 (pg. 674 - 75 ) , vol.(pg. 62 Corson E. S. Nostalgia and Melancholia in the Tropics , American Medicine , 1903 Nov. 7 (pg. 743 - 44 ) (pg. 63 Stearns American Cool (pg. 105 - 6 )pg. 102 pg. 118 (pg.)pg.pg. 64 Conklin Edmund S. Principles of Adolescent Psychology , 1935 New York (pg. 209 - 16 ) (pg. 65 Pyle Ernie Last Chapter , 1945 New York pg. 5 pg. 66 Cowan Ruth Schwartz A Social History of American Technology , 1997 New York (pg. 236 - 37 ) (pg. 67 American Psychiatric Association, Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics , Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders , 1952 Washington 68 Spock Benjamin The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care , 1957 New York (pg. 348 - 51 ) (pg. 69 I Want to Come Home! , Good Housekeeping , 1996 Jul. , vol. 222 pg. 59 , vol.pg. 70 Brown Marc Arthur Goes to Camp , 1982 Boston 71 Van Tilburg M. A. L. Vingerhoets A. J. J. M. Van Heck G. L. Homesickness: A Review of the Literature , Psychological Medicine , 1996 Sept. , vol. 26 (pg. 899 - 912 ) , vol.(pg. 72 Fisher Shirley Fisher Cooper The Psychological Effects of Leaving Home: Homesickness, Health, and Obsessional Thoughts , On the Move pg. 154 pg. 73 Fritzsche Specters of History pg. 1618 pg. 1591 pg.pg.

Figures and Tables

View largeDownload slide The most popular picture at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Breaking Home Ties showed a moment of departure and held great appeal for Americans beset with nostalgia. Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties. Oil on canvas, 1890. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.

View largeDownload slide The most popular picture at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Breaking Home Ties showed a moment of departure and held great appeal for Americans beset with nostalgia. Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties. Oil on canvas, 1890. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.

View largeDownload slide During World War II the U.S. Army attempted to help soldiers understand and cope with their homesickness. Shown here are illustrations from a talk given in 1944. R. Robert Cohen, “Factors in Adjustment to Army Life: A Plan for Preventative Psychiatry by Mass Psychotherapy,” War Medicine, 5 (Feb. 1944), 85. Courtesy American Medical Association.

View largeDownload slide During World War II the U.S. Army attempted to help soldiers understand and cope with their homesickness. Shown here are illustrations from a talk given in 1944. R. Robert Cohen, “Factors in Adjustment to Army Life: A Plan for Preventative Psychiatry by Mass Psychotherapy,” War Medicine, 5 (Feb. 1944), 85. Courtesy American Medical Association.

View largeDownload slide The childrens's book I Want to Go Home used Big Bird, a popular character from the Sesame Streettv show, to teach youngsters that they could deal with separation and overcome homesickness. Sarah Roberts, I Want to Go Home (New York, 1985), 9–10. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu. “Sesame Workshop”®, “Sesame Street”®, and associated characters, trademarks, and design elements are owned and licensed by Sesame Workshop. © 1985 Sesame Workshop. All Rights Reserved. Published by Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, in conjunction with Sesame Workshop. Permission of Sesame Workshop.

View largeDownload slide The childrens's book I Want to Go Home used Big Bird, a popular character from the Sesame Streettv show, to teach youngsters that they could deal with separation and overcome homesickness. Sarah Roberts, I Want to Go Home (New York, 1985), 9–10. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu. “Sesame Workshop”®, “Sesame Street”®, and associated characters, trademarks, and design elements are owned and licensed by Sesame Workshop. © 1985 Sesame Workshop. All Rights Reserved. Published by Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, in conjunction with Sesame Workshop. Permission of Sesame Workshop.

© 2007 by the Organization of American Historians