Rethinking Local History: An Interview with Joseph A. Amato

September 2003 Historically Speaking1 5 Rethinking Local History: An Interview with Joseph A.Amato IN AN IMPORTANT NEW BOOK, Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History,Joseph A. Amato makes thecaseforan innovative approach to writing local history. Drawing on his backgroundin European culturalhistoryanda wealth ofexperiencewritingaboutthelocal andregionalhistory ofsouthwestern Minnesota, Amatoargues convincingly that localhistory shouldbe vastly more captivating and important than itcurrently is. Localhistory, as conceptualizedin Rethinking Home, ¿r a long wayfrom the antiquarian stereotype so often disdainedbyprofessionalhistorians . Butneithershoulditserveas the mere microcosmicreflection ofacademic historians' macrocosmic constructions. In theprocess of advancinga new blueprintforlocalhistorians, Amato raises a numberof important questions about the relationship ofthe various scales ofhistoricalinquiry , indeedaboutthevery natureandpurpose ofhistoricalinquiry itself. Toprovidereaders »/Historically Speaking with an opportunity to encounterAmato's rich work andevaluate it on their own, we havesecured permissionfrom the University ofCalifornia Press to excerptportions (with minor adaptations) ofthe introduction and conclusion ofRethinking Home. Followingtheexcerpt, weprovidean interviewthatDonaldYerxa conductedwithJoseph Amato on May 27, 2003. An Excerpt from RethinkingHome'' byJosephA. Amato People ofeveryplace and time deserve a history. Onlylocal andregionalhistory satisfythe need to remember the most intimate matters, the things of childhood. Local history carries with it the potential to reconstructourancestors' everydaylives: the goods, machines, and tools with which they worked, and rhe groups in which they were raised, in which they matured, celebrated, had ambitions, retired, and resigned themselves to their fates. It recaptures how they experienced the world through their senses: what they thought; how they felt; what they got angry, fought, and cursed about; what theyprayed for; what drove them insane; and finally, how they died and were buried. Every community has stories worthy of telling but few devoted historians worthy of tellingthem. On everyfront, local historians encounterdramaticchanges in environments, materials, technologies, institutions, and bureaucracies. The past has been displaced at dizzying rates. Traditions and mentalities have been superseded, manners and crafts extinguished. Places and locales have been overrun as suburbs, subdivisions, and malls have expanded to satisfy and satiate an ever more powerful and demanding commercial civilization. Ways of Ufe that were unimagined in the countryside mere decades ago are now taken as the norm. Local history focuses on the laboratory ofchange. Itprovides facts, comparisons, and contexts—the very pilings and piers ofcertain human knowledge—for the abstract reaches ofcontemporary social science and history. In the United States, historian Constance McLaughlin Green points out that "foranytrueunderstandingofAmerican cultural development, the writing and study of American local history is ofprimary importance . There He the grassroots ofAmerican civilization .... [There one finds] ourvaried population stocks and theirsharplydifferentiated cultural inheritances, the widely differing environments and the rapidity of changes in our economic life." 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. It serves nostalgia, which (especially when one concedes nostalgia's political andliterarycultivation and exploitation ) is arguablyas compellinga cultural force as the quest for progress. Local history serves more than personal desire and individual nostalgia, however. It meets groups' collective yearning to bring back to life departed peoples, places, and times, tempting nostalgia and commerce equally to exploit themes ofinheritance and heritagewithpageants, themeparks, and even real estate ventures. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, "Every old part ofthe country is filled with memorials of our past; tombstones and cottages and churches, names and legends, old roads and trails and abandoned mines, aswell as the thingswebuiltandused yesterday.Allthesememorialsbringus closer to the past, and, so doing, bring us closer to thepresent; forwe are livinghistoryaswell as recordingit; and ourmemories are as necessaryas ouranticipations." Localhistoryprovides the natural link between the immediate experience and generalhistory. Itconfirms the idea that one's own home is worthy of study and, again in the words ofMumford, promotes "a decentself-respect,''anditis that "form ofself-knowledge which is the beginningofsoundknowledgeaboutanyoneelse ." Local history's topics are innumerable in Reprinted with permission from Rethinking Home: A Casefar WritingLocalHistory (University ofCalifornia Press, 2002). Citations have been eliminated. 16Historically Speaking · September 2003 their combinations. They arise from the desire to know, to explain, to preserve, to understand, and to commemorate. Theyflow out ofinterest in and curiosity about one's own place ofworship, business, and civic and social organizations. Like the impulses that underpinjournalism, local historytakes form around thewish to documentsingle episodes, which...