Joseph Amato on Local History and the Decline of Rural America

Joe Amato, emeritus professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University, is a prolific and creative scholar. He has published eye-opening books on unique topics (his most recent is Surfaces: A History). He is also a veteran practitioner of the kinds of history most avidly pursued by non-academics: genealogy and local history. The January, April, and June issues of the 2013 volume of the Historical Society's bulletin Historically Speaking feature a three-part essay series by Amato, "Place and American History," where he ruminates on these seemingly mundane--though in his hands anything but--historiographical genres. Recently Amato spoke to South Dakota Public Radio's Nathan Puhl about these essays. You can listen to their conversation here.

A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013

Randall Stephens

In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking.  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers. 

The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.  

Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treaties of 1713 and 1763, family life in colonial New England, and a critique of hagiographical popular history. To round it out, Sean McMeekin speaks with Don Yerxa about the significance of July 1914 and the coming of World War I.