Journal ArticleDOI
So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North
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In this article, the authors focus on the emotional distress caused by soldiers' detachment from homes and families, and analyze debates over how to manage and treat nostalgia in the Civil War North.Abstract:
"So Lonesome I Could Die" seeks to historicize the emotional effects of war by analysing debates over how to manage and treat nostalgia in the Civil War North. At this time, both physicians and laypeople viewed nostalgia (or homesickness) as a deadly disease that might kill a man outright, but more frequently precipitated or exacerbated other illnesses. Focusing on the emotional distress caused by soldiers' detachment from homes and families, this diagnosis stands in contrast to modern conceptions of war trauma, which emphasize the impact of participating in or witnessing horrific violence. Whereas the diagnosis of nostalgia generated little controversy in the mid-nineteenth century, there was no such consensus over the proper treatment of homesick troops. According to certain physicians and military leaders, the best curative lay in turning soldiers' thoughts away from home through harsh discipline and active combat. Yet, there were also many in the North who believed in the medical, military, and political value of promoting, rather than repressing, strong domestic feeling in the Union ranks. Wartime debates over the treatment of nostalgic men suggest that even as some held up the detached warrior as a model, others continued to emphasize the primary importance of domestic ties in creating ideal soldiers and virtuous citizens.read more
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The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited
TL;DR: Lowenthal as discussed by the authors revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs, and shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture.
Journal ArticleDOI
Confidence Men and Painted Women, A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. By Karen Halttunen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. xviii + 262 pp. $19.95)
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Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.
TL;DR: The evolution of the concept of nostalgia is traced from its origins as a medical disease to its contemporary understanding as a psychological construct and the processes of semantic drift and depathologization are explored.
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Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out
TL;DR: The history of the emotions first developed as a field of inquiry in Europe, but it took root in the United States only in the 1980s and today, the field has expanded dramatically as discussed by the authors.
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The sociality of personal and collective nostalgia
TL;DR: Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, is an ambivalent -albeit more positive than negative -emotion as mentioned in this paper, which is infused with sociality, as it refers to important figures from one's pas...
References
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American Manhood: Transformations In Masculinity From The Revolution To The Modern Era
TL;DR: A history of American manhood community to individual: The Transformation of Manhood at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Boy Culture Male Youth Culture Youth and Male Intimacy The Development of Mens Attitudes toward Women Love, Sex, and Courtship Marriage Work and Identity The Male Culture of the Workplace Passionate Manhood: A Changing Standard of Masculinity Roots of Change: The Women Without and the Woman Within Epilogue: Manhood in the Twentieth Century as discussed by the authors
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Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870
TL;DR: Halttunen draws a vivid picture of the social and cultural development of the upwardly mobile middle class, basing her study on a survey of the conduct manuals and fashion magazines of mid-nineteenth-century America as discussed by the authors.
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Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
TL;DR: In this article, the idea of cultures of letters and literature in Antebellum America are discussed. But the focus is on the reading of regions rather than the authorship of the authors.