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REVIEWS
| Rethinking Home. A Case for Writing Local History. By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002. xvi plus 245 pp. $48.00 cloth, $18.95.).
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| The problem with traditional writings that fall under the heading of `local history' is precisely that they tend to be rather too local—they lack reference to any greater whole. This is well known to everyone involved in history. They also know that such works are often very dull: there is a lack of overview, authors lose themselves in the fine details without recognizing their significance, and the material often seems addressed to only a highly restricted audience. Much local history lies on the borders of what one would consider 'academic' tending to be produced by or with the support of amateur historians and therefore failing to reach through to professional historians. But worst of all, these works habitually lack the passion to grip and hold on to their readers' attention, to carry them off into the underworld of the past in the way that history can do when at its best. In fairness, this last failing is perhaps not solely a problem for local historians—the entire subject has to grapple with the reader's attention, with unequal success, as the examples prove. |
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Joseph Amato's book Rethinking Home. A Case for Writing Local History is not conventional local history, still less a conventional work of history in the accepted sense of the word. It is an unusual and compelling discourse on the past with real power to take its readers by surprise. Amato is a Frenchman taken on by a little institution in the US Midwest (Southwest State College), in a small community of around 12,000 people called Marshall, where he taught for several decades. In the book he focuses on the history of southwestern Minnesota, but against a background of his former specialist area of study, contemporary European intellectual history. This is certainly an unconventional blend and one that has clearly had a constructive influence on his life and work in the field. |
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