Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History
By Joseph A. Amato

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 to have their history recorded, Amato draws on his roles 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 exploring the uniqueness of one locale, this lively work demonstrates that contemporary local history provides a vital tool for understanding the relation between immediate experience and the metamorphosis of the world at large. In an era of all-encompassin global forces and sensibilities, Rethinking Home affirms the power of local history to revivfy 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.

"Rethinking Home is pioneering scholarship at its best. Amato makes his case for a new local history combining academic sophistication with a deft human touch, one that can provide a new perspective on the way in which humans have interacted with their natural and created environments over the past 150 years. Amato's eloquent plea for scholars to rethink the intricate relationships between home, place, nation, and world is one that cannot be ignored."

-Richard O. Davies
University of Nevada

 

 

 

University of California Press, 2002

Book Reviews from The Key Reporter, Winter 2003 and Minnesota History, Winter 2002-03

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Last updated: February 1, 2006