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The second chapter examines Guy Penrod—singer in the Gaither Vocal Band through the Homecomings’ most successful run, and the face of the franchise during its heyday. The first of three chapters that focus on a particular Homecoming figure, chapter two investigates the Homecoming “construction” of Penrod as a rugged yet sensitive family man during and beyond the “Promise Keeper” era, in which American evangelical masculinity is going through significant changes. Penrod exemplifies how the Gaithers choose and contour performers to satisfy and challenge fans’ expectations.

Chapter three explores the (a)politics of the Homecomings. For several reasons, the Gaithers intend their gospel programs to be free of politics—primarily free of the party endorsements that have saturated and often harmed the ministries of a number of their fellow public evangelicals, dating back to the Nixon-Billy Graham era, into the heyday of the Religious Right. Notwithstanding some kinds of Homecoming “apoliticism,” there are several senses of “politics” resident, implicitly and explicitly, in Homecoming discourse. The appearances and disappearances of these “politics” in the Homecoming world exposes the promises and perils that face American evangelical communities—and, more broadly, the American democratic community of which they are an important constituent.

Chapter five picks up chronologically where chapter one ended: the turn of the century. It focuses on what happens as the Homecomings leave the American South, when a number of the gospel “legends” to whom the early videos pay tribute die. When the Gaithers have a decade’s worth of Homecoming social capital at their backs, they demonstrate the ability to more explicitly push at the demographic boundaries of their fan base.

This chapter briefly discusses Plato's doctrine on truth and Hegel's concept of experience, and examines in detail Hölderlin's “Homecoming/To the Kinsmen” and “Re-collection”. The two Hölderlin essays describe the poet as a wanderer returning home and delineate the essence of the poet as a poet. “Homecoming” treats the theme with bolder strokes, while “Re-collection” examines the necessity of the journey, its meaning, and the exact nature of homecoming. The discussion focuses on the thinking of Being and the essence of poetry to understand thought.

This chapter centers on the celebration of Pinhook Day, which has taken place as long as anyone can remember, and still continues to this day over six years after the breach. Detailing the celebration itself as a homecoming event, this chapter explores the importance of this annual tradition in helping to reconstruct the idea of home and to shape memories of the collective history of the community and its residents. This kind of gathering is particularly important in light of what was lost in the aftermath of the breach. Many Pinhook residents, faced with very little time to move and store their belongings, lost precious keepsakes – pictures, family bibles, certificates, books, Bibles – that marked important events among families and in the larger community. Pinhook Day provides a venue for remembered events, people, and lives when Pinhook was a thriving town.

Camp leads the New Haven Clock Company as the company successfully builds a profitable business in inexpensive pocket watches. Factory expansions are made, the company builds a significant financial surplus, and sizable dividends are paid. Camp writes a series of three fictional sports books for boys from 1908 to 1911 and with assistance from ghostwriters publishes two more series: one, from 1911 to 1914, of six less expensive books under a pseudonym (Camp probably wrote the first book in this series) and another, from 1913 to 1915, of three books under Camp’s name (possibly all by a ghostwriter). A culture is growing around football, with a play on Broadway (The College Widow in 1904), added fight songs, homecoming festivities (beginning about 1910), and a first game at the Tournament of Roses (1902). The Intercollegiate Athletic Association becomes the NCAA and by 1909 has sixty-seven members; it is led until 1930 (except for the years 1913-16) by Palmer Pierce.

This chapter examines some of the transitions in Ray Bradbury's life and career by focusing on the role played by Don Congdon, editorial at Simon & Schuster. It begins with a consideration of Bradbury's deteriorating relationship with Grant Beach, followed by a discussion of challenges on the professional front, including the poor sales of his pulp market stories. It then turns to developments that boded well for Bradbury for the long term, such as the increasing interest being shown by anthologists and New York publishing houses towards his work and the opportunities resulting from his four major market magazine sales in the summer of 1945. It also looks at Bradbury's relationship with Congdon and how he helped him secure major sales for some of his best new fiction such as “Homecoming,” which sold to Mademoiselle. Under Congdon's guidance, Bradbury also saw increased demand for reprints of his short stories such as “Skeleton,” “The Watchers,” and “Invisible Boy.”

This chapter follows Robinson from his release from North Vietnam to his return to duty in the Air Force. Particular attention is devoted to the formal repatriation process, Operation Homecoming. The chapter describes events at Clark AFB and Andrews AFB. It highlights the press coverage of the returning POWs and some of the first speeches given by the released prisoners. It also discusses the family reunions that took place.

This chapter examines mourning and loss across a spectrum from individual bereavement to the disappearance of a paradoxically enabling wartime community. The absence of war, while long desired, was difficult to assimilate, and the process of mourning was constrained by the dominant cultural modes of British expression: understatement and euphemism. The writing of grief – like war itself – is shown to resist straightforward articulation. Beginning with an examination of women writers’ ambivalent return to ‘normality’, the chapter moves on to explore fictions of homecoming, breakdown and trauma. Examining fiction by writers as diverse as Nigel Balchin, Stevie Smith, Henry Green and Rose Macaulay, the chapter considers the narrative methods and thematic preoccupations of writers attempting to express the disorientation and fragmentation of postwar subjectivities. The psychological damage of war, while particularly intense for combat veterans, is shown to permeate culture, contaminating ideas of home and the possibilities of communication. The final sections consider poetry and the challenge of elegy, in particular in the work of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot.

The chapter traces military-civilian relations during the Vietnam War and the challenges faced by Vietnamericans who remained in Vietnam compared with those who were evacuated in Operation Babylift of left Vietnam for the United States after the Amerasian Homecoming Act. Using historical and sociological approaches as well as psychological and psychiatric analyses, the investigation shines a light on how the three distinct groups experienced their upbringing and lifecourses in very different ways, depending on where geopolitical circumstances and foreign intervention placed them.The analysis zooms in on international and interracial adoption as one chosen avenue to ‘rescue’ children left behind by foreign troops – a policy found in the aftermath of many conflicts, but first practiced on a large scale in the aftermath of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

This chapter examines Amerasians, those who could have been but were not adopted by American families in the 1970s. National concern about this population revived ideas about responsibility to the unwanted children of Vietnam and enabled the passage of legislation that facilitated their migration. Amerasians imagined rediscovering their fathers, winning social acceptance, and escaping poverty, but charges of fraud and misrepresentation, the complexity and rarity of father-child reunions, and the difficulties of adjustment in a national where one was presumed an American rather than guided to become one, compromised their sense of citizenship.