The World War II Generation of Historians

20Historically Speaking · September 2003 term ofequivocation. It is an accordion-like term: it can be a compressed into something like southwestern Minnesota; or it can be expanded to include the whole Midwest. What we do with the word region is a reflection of how creative we are in recognizing the past and how willful we are in inventing it. My son Anthony and I, for example, wrote an article "Minnesota: Real and Imagined " for a special issue ofDaedalus that got a fair amount ofattention because we argued that Minnesota was largely a cultural invention . Yerxa: RethinkingHome contains a wealth of wisdom about the human condition and at times reads like a meditation on the importance ofthe local and the particular in our historical understanding. Is part of your case fora new local history that itbecomes a source of wisdom and even moral reflection , and not just the raw material for larger scale historical generalizations? Amato: My natural inclination is to subtitle all my books a "Meditation on" or "Reflections on." I do take things as reflections of the human condition. I am quite willing to have division,.paradox, contradiction, and the non-resolution ofthings exist in the past and present. And I am quite willing to have such antinomies exist in my own mind. And I do like the local because it can be iconoclastic and anarchic. I am in agreement with Carlo Ginzburg and earlier social and historical theorists that you can't square the general and the particular. They are just two different realities, and they cut through history , philosophy, and indeed experience itself. Beyond that, I want to say that it is better to set aside the meta-narrative and move away from the tangled bank ofepistemologies . In turn, I would like to advance another impulse: to make sense ofparticular places now, to make sense ofhome now. That stands in contradiction to what I believe has been the ruling impulse since the 1960s, perhaps even earlier: that we should be above all else interested in, and tolerant of, the distant, strange, downtrodden, remote, and alas ideologically fashionable place, race, cause, etc. I am looking for diversity in the differences ofparticularplaces, which, nevertheless, are being dramatically changed by the world at large. Yerxa: What are you working on now, and does that work continue the themes in Rethinking Home? Amato: I just completed a manuscript entitled On Foot: A Cultural History ofWalking. Being propelled on wheels has created new abstract environments in which we annihilate space and place. Writing a history ofwalking across the ages becomes a way to deliberate on our disembodiment from the world. Where we really know a place, we walk it, or perhaps we canoe it. We go at a pace in which we experience and can assimilate the place. More and more ofus in contemporary society, however, move to the rhythm and speed ofour impulses and wishes rather than our feet. In effect, my work on walking continues my meditation on locality and the themes oflandscape, place, and diversity. I am just now starting to work on a book about genealogy and family history, which are inseparable from local history. I want to reflect on the interconnection ofgenealogy, history, and story-telling, and I will do this in terms ofmy family's history and with reference to the process ofconstructing it. The World War Il Generation of Historians William Palmer In recent years much has been written about an extraordinary generation of Americans, those born between about 1910 and 1922, usually known as the World War II generation. This generation has become synonymouswith hardship andsacrifice . In the 1930s their generational identity was formed in the crucible ofthe Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and World War?. Theirtriumphas a generational force was announced in 1961 byJohn Kennedy, himself a member ofthe generation, when he remarked in his inaugural address thathis election signified the "passing ofthe torch to a new generation ofAmericans.'' There is also a World War ? generation ofhistorians, a group that exerted comparable influence over the historical profession. Those enteringgraduate school between the mid-1950s and the early 1980swere likelyto find their reading Usts dominated by works written bymembers ofthis group. In American...