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If for you local history amounts to little more than a long parade of irrelevant names, places and dates, or if it breeds nostalgia, Joseph A. Amato wants you to think again.

With a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society, the author and professor of history and rural and regional studies at Southwest State University in Marshall set out to write a local and regional history book that departed from the norm.

Instead, through example and suggestion, Amato has created a kind of blueprint local historians everywhere might follow in reconstructing universes of such things as senses, secrets, insanity, perversity, sounds and anything else that individualizes and personalizes a locale. His key lies in flushing out the details.

"I tried to drop a trail of fact that turned into poetry," Amato said. "Not poetry that's ornate, but poetic in the larger sense of dropping elemental truths about the human condition, but dropping them through the telling details, kind of like leaving a trail of little diamonds in case somebody wanted to pick them up."

The result, "Rethinking Home, A Case for Writing Local History," is more than engaging and innovative, according to Richard O. Davies, University Foundation professor at the University of Nevada. The book makes a case for "a new local history combining academic sophistication with a deft human touch that can provide a new perspective on the way in which humans have interacted with their natural and created environments over the past 150 years," he said. "It is an eloquent plea for scholars to rethink the intricate relationships between home, place, nation and the world."

People of every time and place deserve a history, and only local historians occupy a position that allows them to collect not just details about laws changing over time and buildings that once stood but stories about personalities, creatures, landscapes, smells and a huge array of other matters limited only by the imagination, Amato said. The histories of these things are what help define a place.

"Without a past, without some kind of common construct, how are you going to knit together old timers and newcomers in a community?" Amato asked. "And as much turnover as we have, either of the individuals involved or the very objects that are on the landscape, do you even have a community left if you don't have a common story?

"I think it's a question of why does a human being need a memory? What present do you have or what future do you have without a memory? If a community, a place doesn't have stories (people) tell each other or it doesn't have any common boundaries, then to me a place vanishes."

As Amato's book illustrates in rich detail, communities across southwest Minnesota are ripe with stories worth telling.

"(Amato's) vivid portraits of individual people, places, situations and cases, which include murders, crop scams and taking custody of the law, are joined to local illustrations of the use of environmental and ecological history," said Bradley P. Dean of the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Conn.

The book demonstrates that contemporary local history provides a vital link for understanding the relation between immediate experience and the metamorphosis of the world at large, Dean said.

The basic shell of many of the stories could easily have happened elsewhere, and some of them likely did, Amato said. Like Pipestone, other towns drew their names and identity from rock. Like Marshall's retail stores, shops sprouted with high expectations in other railroad towns and then struggled under changing and expanding markets.

The fine details set these towns and their inhabitants apart from other

seemingly similar locales yet at the same time address collective experiences, Amato said.

"When you really dig down, details just have a way of turning into universalities," Amato said. "You describe a long hard trip a person has taken in detail and it could almost be every human being marching through time. It's the anecdotal detail."

To recapture specifics, historians need trails to follow, including historians of the future, Amato said. Consequently, securing details in the present and preserving them for the future is vital. Otherwise, trails grow cold.

For instance, future historians need newspapers to tell unexpected stories in detail, or businesses, county fairs and other agencies and organizations to retain detailed records, or people to transcribe oral histories and write diaries, Amato said.

"Our job is to document not just the place and the time, but to attempt to document what's changing," Amato said. "We should capture this place better than any place in America; we would be a national treasure maybe 50 years from now."

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