So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North

Clarke, Frances

doi:10.1353/jsh.2008.0001

Cited by 24 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Not able to find any bodily disease, he testified that her debility proceeded from her mind (Rutledge, 1997). Physicians had come to view nostalgia as a mental disease that manifested in physical symptoms, but the development of a field of specialists in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders was still in its infancy (Anderson, 2010;Clarke, 2007). Whereas Hofer's disease model concentrated attention on symptoms, prognosis, and treatments, prior to Hofer, homesickness was presumed to be the norm, even admirable or noble.…”

Section: Nostalgia As a Physical Disease: Medical Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nostalgia As a Physical Disease: Medical Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.

Batcho

2013

History of Psychology

114

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The concept of nostalgia has changed substantially both denotatively and connotatively over the span of its 300-year history. This article traces the evolution of the concept from its origins as a medical disease to its contemporary understanding as a psychological construct. The difficulty of tracing a construct through history is highlighted. Attention is paid to roles played first by the medical context, and then by the psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and psychological approaches. Emphasis is given to shifts in the designation of nostalgic valence from bitter to sweet to bittersweet, and the processes of semantic drift and depathologization are explored. Because the sense of nostalgia was constructed and reconstructed within social, cultural, and historical contexts, its meaning changed along with the words used to describe and connect it to other entities. Nostalgia's past illustrates the influence of language, social-cultural context, and discipline perspectives on how a construct is defined, researched, and applied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

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Section: Nostalgia As a Physical Disease: Medical Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nostalgia As a Physical Disease: Medical Originsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.

Batcho

2013

History of Psychology

114

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“…During the Civil War in the USA, there were over 2,500 soldiers with documented symptoms of nostalgia (Matt, 2007). During the 1800's, the definition shifted to a mental disease that displayed physical symptoms but based on our lack of understanding of mental disorders at the time that proved inaccurate (Anderson, 2010; Clarke, 2007). Nostalgia was viewed a sort of psychological disorder often related to homesickness until the 20th century.…”

Section: A Review Of Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Time will tell: examining the role of nostalgia in retro sport merchandise purchase intentions

Scola

Dwyer

Gordon

2023

SBM

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PurposeThe authors sought to examine how nostalgic feelings influenced purchase intentions of sport fans towards branded merchandise. Additionally, the goal was to test the childhood brand nostalgia (CBN) scale to see if it was an effective measure in this context. This was an important early step in understanding the way nostalgia may influence sport fan's merchandise preferences.Design/methodology/approachSurveys were completed by 601 fans of two professional sport teams in the USA. These consumers were targeted geographically through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and half given a modern branded t-shirt and the other half a retro branded t-shirt. To examine brand nostalgia in this context, the CBN measure was evaluated and examined to see its impact on each group, using hierarchical regressions.FindingsThe results demonstrated that CBN positively impacted consumers purchase intentions in the retro logoed t-shirt group. However, in the modern logoed t-shirt group, CBN did not significantly influence purchase intentions.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study suggest that retro merchandise is working as expected, as it is attractive to those who feel nostalgic about their team. Secondarily, this study's findings suggest it may be vital for marketers to be conscious that their retro materials are connecting to the past.Originality/valueThis study was an early examination of a measure of nostalgia and its impact on purchase intentions in sport. The findings suggested that this CBN instrument may be appropriate in retro marketing research, especially regarding sport merchandise. Further, the findings suggest that nostalgic feelings may be influential toward retro merchandise, but not modern merchandise.

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“…For the first time during the Civil War, army doctors treated homesickness as a deleterious illness that affected the troops as they camped far from their loved ones. 66 Homesickness can in many ways be defined as visual, and the thought of one intensely quiet, contemplative, their faces highlighted with broad strokes of the brush that make out sketchy lineaments rather than identifiable physiognomies. In her recent evaluation of the relationship between "inner" life and observed reality in Homer's work, Elizabeth Johns interprets Home, Sweet Home as part of Homer's maturation as an artist.…”

Section: Home Sweet Homementioning

confidence: 99%

Definite Indeterminacy: Blindness in the Civil War Imagery of Ambrose Bierce and Winslow Homer

Schulman¹

2013

InVisible Culture

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The wound around his eye] has been constantly open, suppurating and discharging ever since … with loss of strength and increasing blindness in the left eye which is very weak & he is less & less able each year to do any manual labor or care for himself. 1 Applying in 1882 for an increase to his Civil War pension, Private James M. Greenleaf, who received his facial wound at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, attempted to convince the government that his eye-unhealed and rapidly losing its sight-was so debilitating as to prevent him from earning a living through gainful employment. To the above statement in his pension application, Greenleaf added an "affidavit signed by 24 acquaintances stating that his wound was worse than the loss of an arm or a leg." 2 Though Greenleaf also complained of pain in his hip, it was the wound to his face, with its leaking pus, that made him "totally & permanently helpless," as the government surgeon wrote on examining him in 1907. 3 The claim that Greenleaf's partial blindness incapacitated him more than the amputation of a limb stands out in a narrative-one of pathos, to be sure, given how frequently his applications were rejected by the government-that was all too common throughout the post-Civil War era. I take Greenleaf's story not as a representative case of the logistical problems faced by veterans of the Civil War but rather as a signpost to a larger cultural narrative that emerged as a response to war trauma in the years following the conflict: that of blindness.Two eyewitnesses to the war, author Ambrose Bierce and artist Winslow Homer, used different artistic media to come to terms with the trauma of the war. I argue that instead of being mere "realists," as they are often described, they used metaphors of blindness or compromised vision in their literary and artistic works. 4 Bierce and Homer deploy these strategies of incomplete representation as a commentary on the futility of using traditional forms of representation to depict the unprecedented horrors of mechanized warfare. Though working in different media, both men questioned how one might begin to represent such a conflict. After examining the ways that both Bierce and Homer developed theories of truth and vision, this essay will examine different modes of "blindness" that they presented in their representations of the war. These modes range from the paradoxical narrowing of vision created by technologies specifically designed to enhance natural sight, the moral and literal blindness of participating in a military engagement, and, finally, the ways that their war experiences caused both Homer and Bierce to question their own self-knowledge and clarity of vision.

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So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North

Cited by 24 publications

References 50 publications

Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.

Nostalgia: The bittersweet history of a psychological concept.

Time will tell: examining the role of nostalgia in retro sport merchandise purchase intentions

Definite Indeterminacy: Blindness in the Civil War Imagery of Ambrose Bierce and Winslow Homer

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