Download or read book Homesickness written by Susan J. Matt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-17 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties. By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity.

Download or read book I was Dreaming to Come to America written by Veronica Lawlor and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1995 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their own words, coupled with hand-painted collage illustrations, immigrants recall their arrival in the United States. Includes brief biographies and facts about the Ellis Island Oral History Project.

Download or read book Journey to a New Land written by Kimberly Weinberger and published by Mondo Pub. This book was released on 2000 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elda Willitts recounts for the Ellis Island Oral History Project her childhood journey to America from Italy in 1916.

Download or read book I Was Dreaming to Come to America written by Veronica Lawlor and published by . This book was released on 1995-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Passages to America written by Emmy E. Werner and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than twelve million immigrants, many of them children, passed through Ellis Island's gates between 1892 and 1954. Children also came through the "Guardian of the Western Gate," the detention center on Angel Island in California that was designed to keep Chinese immigrants out of the United States. Based on the oral histories of fifty children who came to the United States before 1950, this book chronicles their American odyssey against the backdrop of World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of Hitler's Third Reich, and the hardships of the Great Depression. Ranging in age from four to sixteen years old, the children hailed from Northern, Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe; the Middle East; and China. Across ethnic lines, the child immigrants' life stories tell a remarkable tale of human resilience. The sources of family and community support that they relied on, their educational aims and accomplishments, their hard work, and their optimism about the future are just as crucial today for the new immigrants of the twenty-first century. These personal narratives offer unique perspectives on the psychological experience of being an immigrant child and its impact on later development and well-being. They chronicle the joys and sorrows, the aspirations and achievements, and the challenges that these small strangers faced while becoming grown citizens.