| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History. By Joseph A. Amato. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvi, 245 pp. Cloth, $48.00, ISBN 0-520-22772-7. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-520-23293-3.)

In Rethinking Home, Joseph A. Amato attempts to argue the case for writing local histories. Using innovative and absorbing topics such as cleanliness, sound, anger, madness, the clandestine, the environment, and the community in southwestern Minnesota, local history is writ large for would-be historians to develop studies of the particular into understandings of broader social processes.

The theory of the book is persuasive as justification for the importance of local history: to impress upon readers "to write local history ... to learn a place in detail while understanding it as part of an unprecedented mutation, transformation and metamorphosis" (p. 29). It is a task successfully accomplished by John Bodnar (1991) in Remaking America, but it does not reach its desired end here. While Amato sets out to make a "plea for scholars to rethink the intricate relationship between home, place, nation and world" (p. xvi), he fails to lead by example. His text describes histories of place as local intricacies, but, rather than unravel the processes by which the local is produced by broader events, Amato assumes such relationships exist and simply describes them.

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