Mini‑Series: The History of the Local, of Family, and of the Everyday
Three conversations with Joseph Amato that turn the ordinary into history
What is This?
This is the first of what is hopefully a variety of additional offerings from Historically Thinking. Since we have a pretty large back catalog, it seems good to present pieces of it in combination with one another, or in different configurations.
Today’s offering is a mini-series, a few episodes which have some thematic connection, or perhaps the same guest, or perhaps both—which is the case today. To this we will add Field Guides, which cover a broad historical topic; Problem Guides, that are built around a specific historical question, rather than a topic; How to Think Historically guides, which discuss historical habits of mind, rather than historical “content”; and, depending on demand, Classroom Companions.
Why These Three Together?
Place, kin, and daily practice are the scaffolding of historical experience. Taken together, these episodes make a compact seminar in how to see: where we are, who we’re from, and what we habitually do. And they were all conversations with one man, Joseph A. Amato, a quirky intellectual who lived his life and taught history in a forgotten corner of Minnesota.
Joseph Amato (1938-2025)
Joseph Amato the son of a father born in Sicily, and of a mother whose ancestry stretched back to seventeenth century Massachusetts—all of which he explored in his book Jacob’s Well: . As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan he fell under the spell of history, taught to him by rigorously minded European refugees. It was I suppose not too surprising that his PhD focused on European intellectual history.
In the end he found a strange place to apply it. He got a job at Southwest State University in Marshall, MN, two years after it began classes, and was there for the next thirty-five years. He could have just taught his “field”. But Joe Amato was a curious man. He looked around him, at what to others would be the very uninteresting place where prairie became plains, and he saw that there was a history there. This interested him, and he began to write about it, applying all the deep thinking of European intellectual history. This was not, so far as he was concerned, using a sledgehammer to peel an egg. It was giving respect to a subject that deserved it. So he came to speak of “micro-regional history”, as a necessary field of focus; I don’t know whether he invented the term, but I’m going to keep acting as if he did.
He was curious about much else besides that. This is a man who wrote a book about dust; and one about walking, which he did when playing golf, and when not. And not only did he golf, but he wrote poetry; and he hung out at the local bar, as well. (I wish I could draw accurate Venn diagrams of historians, golfers, and poets; besides Amato, who else would be at the intersection? It must be an interesting club.)
“So in the end,” he wrote in the conclusion to Jacob’s Well, “I find consolation in being a historian. The present, I concede, is beyond my command; and the future is not for me to guess. Time, thank goodness, will reveal what I cannot imagine. But I know, and this truly does console, that the past is an inexhaustible storehouse that belongs tome; that rich memories and stories thread past and present together; and that those of us who follow Ariadne’s thread through the past escape today’s narrow reasoning and parsimonious diversity.”
I. Local History is Knowing Your Place
Joseph Amato on why local history matters
Originally published March 4, 2016
“People of every place and time deserve a history.” Joseph Amato argues for the dignity and depth of local and regional history—muskrats and all—and why the clandestine textures of a place outlast grand narratives.
II. Family History is Knowing Yourself
Joseph Amato on rethinking family history
Originally published March 17, 2016
“Family is the well of self.” Amato reframes family history as a discipline of self‑knowledge—more than trees and dates, it’s a way to think clearly about memory, identity, success, failure, social context, and obligation.
III. How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary
Joseph Amato on the history of everyday life
Originally published January 13, 2017
What we call “normal” was once strange. Amato invites us to consider the extraordinary textures of daily life—and how noticing them changes the kinds of histories we write.
Questions for Reflection & Discussion
Amato argues that local history must grapple with both the visible and the hidden—what he calls “the clandestine.” In the place where you grew up (or live now), what stories, silences, or whispered memories sit just outside the official version of history? How might attending to those shadows change your understanding of the community?
Much of the conversation turns on the idea that modern landscapes are in constant motion—economically, environmentally, and demographically—and that local history must evolve to keep pace. What is one way your own region or hometown has transformed in your lifetime, and what new questions would a good local historian need to ask to capture that transformation honestly?
Amato suggests that knowing a place requires knowing how people moved through it: by river or rail, footpath or prairie trail; by migration, intermarriage, or exile. If you traced the movements that shaped your own locality—Indigenous routes, settler arrivals, economic shifts, newcomers, departures—what larger patterns or tensions might come into focus? And how might they challenge the standard story the community tells about itself?
Amato argues that genealogy alone is only a “third” of family history — that real understanding comes when one confronts the stories, silences, emotional textures, and contradictions within a family. What parts of your own family history resist easy explanation, and how might those “odd” or unresolved moments actually be the key to deeper self-knowledge?
“When you’re in a space, you must know a time; when you’re in a time, you must place it in a space.” Amato insists that family history must be embedded in the wider social, economic, and emotional world of its era. How might your understanding of a parent, grandparent, or ancestor change if you placed their lives more deliberately into the physical and historical landscapes in which they lived?
Amato sees family history as a corrective to abstraction — a way of reclaiming depth, texture, memory, and meaning in an age of mass culture. What is one thing you’ve inherited (a story, a habit, an object, a fear, a hope) that shapes how you move through the world today? And how might exploring its origins change the way you think about identity and belonging?
Amato suggests that tools, walls, and even fire-rings create “micro-worlds” that shape how we live and think. If you look at your own everyday surroundings, what human-made features most shape your sense of place and belonging—and how might they look to a historian a century from now?
One of Amato’s recurring themes is the tension between scarcity and abundance, locality and integration, homeostasis and uprooting. Where do you feel that tension most acutely in your own life, and how does it shape what you hope for—and what you resent?
Amato calls nostalgia both dangerous and necessary: it can feed grievance, but it can also deepen gratitude. When you find yourself feeling nostalgic, what exactly are you longing for—and how might you turn that nostalgia into a more honest remembrance of the past rather than an escape from the present?
What are some unities between these three conversations, and perhaps between these three books by Amato? Do you think Amato was one of those historians whose books are different chapters of one enormous book?
Do Amato’s observations make you see things differently? If so, how? And why?
For Further Investigation
Edward Stonearrow-Hanson, “Remembering Dr. Joseph Antony Amato”, The Mustang Buzz, Southwest State Minnesota University, February 20, 2025
Joseph A. Amato, Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering (Greenwood Press, 1990)
—, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (University of California Press, 2000)
—, Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History (University of California Press, 2002)
—, On Foot: A History of Walking (NYU Press, 2004)
—, Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009)
—, Surfaces: A History (University of California, 2013)
—, Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary (Reaktion, 2016)
Tags: history, public history, family history, everyday life, local history, Joseph Amato, podcast