Your Hometown, Yes, but What Do You Know about It?-By Dana Yost Ever drive by the old mink farm on the west side of Marshall, and wonder about it? Ever look at an old photo of the city of Florence, horses tied up outside a storefront, and try to imagine the way the wagon wheels creaked as they crossed the dirt road? Remember your grandmother out back, beating rugs, or your grandfather in the shop wailing away on a piece of metal with a ball-peen hammer? What drove Marshall's commerce 100 years ago, what led its city fathers to make the plans for the future they did? And just how do those plans laid 100 years ago affect you now? If you think local history is merely tracing the names of old mayors and business start dates, think some more. Joe Amato, the longtime Southwest Minnesota State history professor and author, says if we're going to truly understand the place we call home, then we've got to dig deeper than just a list of things. We need to remember the way things smelled and looked and sounded. We need to put commerce and farming and time and the ins and outs of people's lives into a picture that's shaped life in 2003. And that's a point that one of Amato's recent books, "Rethinking Home," drives deeply into those who care about local history. It's about the why, as much as it is about the what. "Rethinking Home" is only one of many books Amato has written on local history, of course. But it is drawing more attention than others of his have--largely because of the challenge he raises. Amato and "Rethinking Home" will figure centrally in next week's
annual joint meeting of the American Association of State and Local Historians,
and the National Council on Public History. They're the leading local
history organizations in the country. The four-day event takes place in
Providence, RI It's a work that knocks some of us right out of our comfort zones. But its time has come, Amato argues. Others seem to agree. "I don't take it to be my major intellectual book, said Amato, who has written dozens of books and has more on the way. "But I continue to get invitations to places in the state and, now, in the nation, because of the book." He recently heard from a historian in Oregon who was working on a book
and redid all the chapter headings in the work after reading Amato's book.
Why? He changed all the headings into quotations lifted from "Rethinking
Home." But Amato worries that many of us don't. He points to southwest Minnesota, in fact, as a place he wonders about. :"We need to keep doing (the church and bank histories), that has to continue," Amato concedes. "History is the way you give significance to something--you commemorate it, memorialize it. "But now, we must write about localities--towns, regions--as seeing them always being in change. This is an age of tremendously dramatic change and transformation. "And this transformation? Has it dramatically changed the entities, too? I'm not sure, but it is my argument that it constitutes or warrants reconsideration of how we write the history of places." Marshall isn't the town it was 10, 20, 30 or 100 years ago. Has its values, its priorities, its very nature changed in that time? "Present change becomes a point of view from which we survey the past of the thing," Amato said. "Does it remain the same in name only? Have things substantially changed? "Do we have towns ruled by people who don't know where they are?" "It's only a possibility, but it could be." Do folks living in southwest Minnesota fully get what the massive overhaul of farming means to the region? Do we understand what the Schwan Food Co.'s recent insistent drive toward growth--and the accompanying pressures on its leadership and community leadership alike--means for Marshall? Even here, on the prairie, the speed of the modern world has changed us--TV and the Internet and job requirements keep many of us away from community involvement. What have we lost, or gained, as the sounds of the prairie have changed from those of hard manual labor to the noises of technology? Kids used to run around with their dogs. Now, they run around with headphones. Adults used to talk over their back fences. Now, through e-mail. It's not necessarily easy to understand what Amato is after. He's creating theory, in a way--a new way of perceiving history. That aspect will be recognized next week, on Amato's trip to New England.
Along with the Providence conference, he's speaking at Nazarene College
in Quincy, Mass. He was invited to the school by the editor of a new history
magazine, which will be profiling Amato, as well. Its audience: Major
historians who devise theory. But in the end, history is also about the way regular folks understand it. Do we--as residents of the area--see the impact of change, understand that new businesses, new motives by leaders, even the loss of the smell of new-cut hay, has changed the place we call home? We'd better. The last thing we need, to borrow from Amato, is having a region filled with people who really don't know where they live. |