Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History

by Joseph A. Amato, Richard O. Davies (Foreword), Charlie Kost (Illustrator)

Joseph A. Amato proposes a bold and innovative approach to writing local history in this imaginative, wide-ranging, and deeply engaging exploration of the meaning of place and home. Arguing that people of every place and time deserve a history, Amato draws on his background as a European cultural historian and a prolific writer of local history to explore such topics as the history of cleanliness, sound, anger, madness, the clandestine, and the environment in southwestern Minnesota. While dedicated to the unique experiences of a place, his lively work demonstrates that contemporary local history provides a vital link for understanding the relation between immediate experience and the metamorphosis of the world at large. In an era of encompassing forces and global sensibilities, Rethinking Home advocates the power of local history to revivify the individual, the concrete, and the particular. This singular book offers fresh perspectives, themes, and approaches for energizing local history at a time when the very notion of place is in jeopardy.

Amato explains how local historians shape their work around objects we can touch and institutions we have directly experienced. For them, theory always gives way to facts. His vivid portraits of individual people, places, situations, and cases (which include murders, crop scams, and taking custody of the law) are joined to local illustrations of the use of environmental and ecological history. This book also puts local history in the service of contemporary history with the examination of recent demographic, social, and cultural transformations. Critical concluding chapters on politics and literature--especially Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Longfellow's Hiawatha --show how metaphor and myth invent, distort, and hold captive local towns, peoples, and places.

Genres: History, Grad School, Nonfiction, Read For School

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Joseph A. Amato was an American author and scholar. Amato was a history professor and university dean of local and regional history. He has written extensively on European intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Southwestern Minnesota. Since retiring, he has continued publishing history books, as well as five poetry collections and his first novel.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really interesting, even poetic, book about the practice of local history. I highly recommend it to anyone who's either doing local history as a researcher, or teaching students how to do local history projects.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amato has an almost poetic turn of mind at times. His book is a good inspiration for the different approaches local history can take.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an inspirational read for anyone considering or already writing local history. It's also a great perspective of rural southwestern Minnesota especially Marshall.

The closing alone is an inspiration,

"One hundred good historians committed to one hundred contemporary local subjects might inspire a renaissance in rethinking home."

Great read!

[David Grabitske · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a how-to manual but several detailed examples of how impactful local history can be when creatively applied.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joe Amato cast down his bucket in southwest Minnesota, and this book is the story of what he dredged up. It is an extended, reflective essay on the practice of local history by an academic. It makes the argument that deep digging in local history is good for the community and for the academy. I get the impression that it is also good for the scholar, a least in this case. I am led to think about the relationship of the scholar to the community, for the scholar's take on local stories may well be different from the traditional tale. This is one aspect of the book that might have been expanded with profit, I think. I would recommend Amato's work for any scholar who finds himself digging into local history, for one of the things distinguishing the scholarly practice of the local craft is self-consciousess.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Professor Amato’s Rethinking Home is one man’s “revisioning” of his home base, his “place” of living and livelihood for over 30 years. Besides reflecting on and dissecting his adult base of operations as a local historian, the author also suggests topics that others might touch on with regard to their particular research locale…such as farm protests, family debt related to farm size, the transformation to a commercial economy, and the like. Local history isn't just people and buildings, but also politics and social behavior. By detailing his own experience and showing us other ways to document the transformations, the author presents "a case for writing local history" and illustrates how much richer we are for it. Intended for local history students, it was an entertaining read.