Dr David Anderson has received funding to undertake research on Homesickness (Nostalgia) in the Confederate Armies during the American Civil War.

Conceived originally as a type of homesickness that plagued seventeenth century Swiss mercenaries, nostalgia became all-too-familiar to Union army doctors and surgeons during the American Civil War and they readily acknowledged the condition as a bona fide disease.

Yet the onset of the Civil War highlighted too the emotional anguish of Confederate soldiers who, in confronting extraordinary social and political turmoil, faced detachment from their homes and the resulting uncoupling of the familiar.

What predicated the nostalgia of the average Confederate soldier during the conflict? What were the symptoms? Was there a remedy? Were there any marked differences between the sufferings of Union soldiers and those of their Confederate adversaries? To what extent did homesickness impact upon other threats to Confederate manpower – notably desertion?

Might we view Civil War soldiers’ homesickness as a precursor to twentieth-century shell-shock and post-traumatic stress disorder?

Given the recent explosion of interest in the social history of the era and current attention afforded to the history of medicine and the history of disability, these questions would appear to be significant and timely ones, but they have, at best, excited little interest among historians of the Civil War and thus detailed investigations are few. This research project aims to remedy this oversight.