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What ‘home’ means-By Jim Muchlinski
Just ask Joe Amato, a Southwest Minnesota State University history and rural studies professor who’s spent a generation teaching, researching and writing about the region. Amato spoke Thursday night at a conference based on his book “Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History.” He talked about what led him to explore several regional history topics, including the 1983 Ruthton murders, the failure of the American Energy Farm Systems Jerusalem artichoke cooperative, immigration to Lyon County by Belgian farm families, and the environmental history of Murray County. He pointed to the 1983 murders of two Ruthton bankers as an example of how local history can demand the same need for interpretation as national or worldwide topics. Amato’s book, “When Father and Son Conspire,” presented a viewpoint that the murders had personal motivations rather than being rooted in the 1980s farm crisis, as other reporters had classified it. Steven Jenkins was convicted of killing the two bankers, and his father, James, committed suicide. Amato’s book became an alternative view to the national selling book “Final Harvest” by a New York Times reporter. “It was rather nice to contradict the New York Times,” Amato said. “They (James and Steven Jenkins) were a mad father and an angry son. It didn’t happen to vindicate an ideology.” Amato went on to talk about how he became interested in other themes with ties to the region. As examples, he pointed to how Jerusalem artichoke promotions in the early 1980s involved “turning a weed into a holy grail” for an unstable farm economy and how there’s been a “continuous, profound and multi-faceted transformation of the landscape” that’s apparent when studying a topic such as the history of ditches and wetlands. He added that he often notices potential historical topics, such as how Marshall’s downtown public park restroom built for a six-figure construction price ties in with the value of indoor plumbing when it was first available. “When I was in graduate school I liked the big theory,” Amato said. “The further I go, the more interested I am in the details. Knowing something in detail can help in understanding something larger.” He said there’s a continuous need to add resources about local history. In talking about how to work with local information, he said nostalgia can lead to a slanted view of the past. It might over-emphasize something like buffalo hunts and undervalue river valleys, or focus on sod houses without attention to the desire of pioneers to quickly replace their sod shelters with more comfortable, permanent homes. He wrote chapters in “Rethinking Home” that stress ways to
look for detail in history. One chapter focuses on the senses, another
on how cultural taboos change over the years, and another on public images
and fears related to insanity. “I’ve seen that people are often bubbling over to talk,” Amato said. “We’ve worked with local history and kept it local, but it’s involved ideas with national and international implications.” The conference also included a group of researchers who’ve worked with the Center for Rural and Regional Studies based at SMSU. Janet Timmerman, a Rural and Regional Studies research fellow who is from the Lake Wilson area, began a presentation on 1830s explorer Joseph LaFramboise by talking about how she found years worth of research based on historical information from a local area around a group of former prairie lakes in western Murray County. “I didn’t expect to spend this much time with the history of one particular place,” Timmerman said. “It’s a local history that’s so deep and so rich I could spend at least another 10 years with it.”
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