| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Joseph A. Amato. Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 245.

All historians tend to be defensive about the kind of history they write, but none are more likely to fret about it than those whose subject is a self-consciously provincial community. Joseph A. Amato claims that local history "satisfies an innate human desire to be connected to a place. It feeds our hunger to experience life directly and on intimate terms" (p. 4). Yet academic historians rarely take it seriously. "If they bother even to notice local and regional historians, professional historians judge them to be narrowly focused fact gathers and eccentric storytellers, or they are irritated by the disdain that amateur local historians show for the academy's No Trespassing signs." To his credit, Amato sees the problem as a two-way street: the objects of scorn are also the purveyors of scorn. "[L]ocal historians go about their business as oblivious to professional historians and their canons as professional historians are indifferent to them" (p. 9). . . .

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