Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local HistoryJoseph 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. |
Contents
| 17 | |
| 30 | |
The Rule of Market and the Law of the Land | 43 |
Writing History through the Senses Sounds | 60 |
Anger Mapping the Emotional Landscape | 77 |
The Clandestine | 97 |
Madness | 113 |
Madame Bovary and a Lilac Shirt Literature and Local History | 128 |
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agricultural American anger buffalo century changing civilization clandestine contemporary corn Coteau des Prairies countryside crops Crossings Press cultural Dakota decades decline define ditch economic emotions Essays on Rural ethnic European farm farmers Granite Falls grasses Hiawatha historians Historical Society human Ibid immigrants Indian insane Iowa Jerusalem Artichoke John Radzilowski Joseph Amato land landscape lives locale Longfellow Lyon County Madame Bovary madness Main Street markets Marshall's Midwest mind Minn Minneapolis Minnesota Marshall Minnesota River Murray County muskrat nesota noise North past Paul pipe Pipestone County Pipestone Quarry Plains plants political Prairie Lake Prairie Lake Region Prairie Town protest quartzite radio railroad red rock Regional History Roelfsema-Hummel Rural and Regional Rural Life Marshall Rural Minnesota Sauk Centre settlement settlers sounds southwest Minnesota Southwest State University southwestern Minnesota stone story tion town's transformation University Press village West wetlands writing York