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The sight of refugees and damaged towns and countryside often lowered troop morale. Some historians argue that after mid-1863, the Union adopted an unofficial strategy that consisted of destroying private property, which took a significant toll on civilians. Labor shortages left non-slave holding Whites in a tough position, and many women and children faced poverty with the men in their familial units absent. Many men in the Army of Tennessee suffered from severe homesickness and expressed this in letters to their families.

Johanna Spyri’s Heidi moves the wider genre of girls’ fiction from a focus on girls who are safe (Backfisch novels and family stories) to girls’ books in which girls are vulnerable (the orphan girl novel). In the former, girls need only worry about their own education and marriage, and the natural world is a source of pleasure; in the latter, girls must change others, and the natural world becomes a vital space for healing. The playful Backfisch period is replaced by an environment of neglect, in which the girl must cultivate relationships in order to survive. Homesickness becomes a response to a dangerous world rather than a messy indicator of the heroine’s need to mature. Heidi’s tremendous success spoke to adult nostalgia for childhood and the desire to be saved from the anxiety of adolescence. Her plot became the central one in the classic girls’ book of the twentieth century.

Witnesses at the 2012 trial in Ohio of a former airman convicted of beating his Okinawan wife to death testified that he had often battered her. The case exemplified the isolation of wives who arrive with no acquaintances in the U.S. besides their husbands, and cannot overcome the language barrier to make other contacts. Isolation also results from the individualistic nature of American society. Interviewees accustomed to close relationships with relatives and neighbours typical in Okinawa were surprised that in the U.S. “neighbours don’t even speak to each other.” Many suffered from homesickness. However, one expressed her gratitude for the close friendship and support of an American woman next door who guided her to the supermarket and post office, teaching her the essentials for daily life. Several encountered racial discrimination in employment, marriage (before 1967), and the bullying of their children in school. Some women had been apprehensive about coming to the U.S. where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II and anti-Japanese hostility persisted afterwards. Those whose husbands were still in the military had free family health care and discount shopping, but had to endure their husbands’ long absences, and deployments to areas of conflict.

This chapter reaches back to Basel and the upper Rhineland in the late seventeenth century, a place of precarious living in times of change, to understand what drove a nineteen year-old medical student from the nearby town of Mulhouse to invent nostalgia. Johannes Hofer borrowed eclectically from early modern medicine to model his Dissertatio medica de Nostalgia (1688) on prevailing accounts of melancholia. But it was the political instability of his time that led him to invent a whole new diagnosis, and in particular a crisis in the Swiss mercenary system upon which his hometown depended for its continued independence. Hofer invented nostalgia because he thought he could cure burly pikemen who broke down with homesickness when stationed abroad. In doing so, he also registered subtle changes in perceptions of time and space, a widespread sense of unease at the momentous social transformations of his epoch.

What did it feel like to be homesick in the early 1800s? This chapter tightens the lens and delves into the sensorial and affective world of those Napoleonic soldiers who suffered from nostalgia on the battlefield. Drawing from a rich collection of letters and diaries, it reconstructs their own narratives of illness in order to get as close as possible to a historical ethnography of people’s affective lives at the time. In doing so, it sheds light on the gender norms and intense family bonds that underpinned the nostalgia diagnosis. At a time when psychiatry was still in its infancy, and the notion of psychological trauma was as yet unimaginable, French military physicians already developed a sophisticated understanding of soldiers’ psychological breakdown, effectively formulating a first systematic conception of war neuroses. Paradoxically, it was the experience of demobilization after Waterloo that pushed many veterans to look upon their years in the army with a certain regret—with a comforting longing for the past that we have called “nostalgia” ever since.