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YESTERDAY: A New History of Nostalgia
by Tobias Becker
(Harvard University Press, US$35 hb, ebook)
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The old joke is right: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Really, it ain’t.
While the word has been around for three centuries-plus, “nostalgia” originally just meant “homesickness”. As late as World War II, the US Army was telling its doctors to watch out for nostalgia among recruits – meaning they wanted to go home.
The word’s shift to its modern meaning is relatively recent. In 1957, dictionary still offered only the original definition; by 1961, it