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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History. By Joseph A. Amato. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2002. xvi + 245 pages.
Astronomers are among the many technically trained professionals who rely on the contributions of amateurs. Leagues of backyard telescope enthusiasts, as their professional colleagues often attest, collect the data that enable all manner of cosmological speculations. David Levy, the amateur astronomer who helped to locate the comet which collided with Jupiter in 1992, "discovered twenty one comets--eight from his own backyard," according to his NASA-sponsored webography. Now to venture a somewhat strange but apt analogy, let us posit history as the sky and historical data as the stars and other celestial phenomena. The cosmologists of history are the grand theorists we usually refer to as "historians." But the data collectors--the women and men who study the past without ever leaving their backyards--are the local historians. Joseph Amato has written a collection of essays whose purpose it is to lend dignity to the often overlooked and certainly taken-for-granted pursuit of local history. Amato does not stop, however, at congratulating the successful backyard historians for their valuable contributions to a professionalized body of university historians. He would, I think, have the professionals join their localized amateur friends in the backyard. Amato would have historians get down on their hands and knees, so to speak, forget (for a time) about theory and historiography, and do something many of them have forgotten, apparently, how to do: immerse themselves in actual data.
Trained as a European cultural historian and clearly influenced in his method and stylistic approach by seminal professional authorities ranging from Marc Bloch to Gaston Bachelard to William Cronon, Amato is neither a naif arguing for the irrelevance of theory nor a firebrand agitating for the dissolution of the profession. His purpose, rather, seems to be to urge his colleagues to enhance their scholarship...
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