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The Trinity of Grace
In this superb collection, Joseph Amato wonderfully blends writing about everyday people and events with a sacred yearning for the mystical and eternal gifts of grace. -Author Dana Yost, back cover.
The Stark Carpathians
The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine’s Hutsuls addresses rituals and texts in a small mountainous area located in today’s Ukraine. The residents of this remote region are known as the Hutsuls. This book argues that Hutsul rituals and texts, cast as ancient and extraordinary, had more mundane roots. They formed out of contact between the region’s residents and lowland institutions, and they became foundations for everyday life. Words and symbolic action had an inherent tension that stemmed from contests over authority. The nature of these contests was such that distant officials, willful locals, and diverse sources of information were often as important as co...
Dust
A history of dust, discussing dust's role as a condition of life and as a measure of the small until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Surfaces
Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations, to the natural world and what we imagine beyond. In this thought-provoking and richly textured book, Joseph A. Amato traces the human relationship with surfaces from the deep history of human evolution, which unfolded across millennia, up to the contemporary world. Fusing his work on Dust and On Foot, he shows how, in the last two centuries, our understanding, creation, control, and manipulation of surfaces has become truly revolutionary—in both scale and volume. With the sweep of grand history matched to existential concerns for the present, he suggests that we have become the surfaces we have made, mastered, and now control, invent, design, and encapsulate our lives. This deeply informed and original narrative, which joins history and anthropology and suggests new routes for epistemology and aesthetics, argues that surfaces are far more than superficial façades of deep inner worlds.
My Three Sicilies
The three Sicilies of Joseph Amato's unusual and finely crafted book can be counted, according to its table of contents, as those of fiction, poetry, and social and family history. But they can also be enumerated in another way-the homeland of his ancestors, especially his paternal grandmother, a strong but tragic figure whose story frames and focuses the entire volume; the locale of his own travels and experiences, vividly captured in the poems at the center of the work; and the historical and spiritual fountainhead of so much of his own personality and world view. Those who share Amato's roots will find much here to connect with, and all other readers will connect with the passion and the sheer humanity that illuminate the work. -Michael Palma
On Foot
An in-depth examination of humankind's first mode of travel traces the history of walking from the first human migrations to the vast, marching armies of ancient Greece and Rome, with special emphasis placed on the relationship between walking and social class.
Victims and Values
Victims and Values joins history and ethics, conducting a timely inquiry into conscience and politics. Mindful of William James's notion that ethics must be grounded in the historical situation, this book examines fundamental ambiquities, dichotomies, and contradictions that we experience about the worth of our own suffering and that of others. In particular, it analyzes how victims make a powerful claim upon contemporary conscience and politics. Amato distances himself equally from those who deny suffering all substantive meaning and those who fashionably transform it into self-righteous identities and political rhetorics and ideologies. Amato's hope is that each person will be able to take...
Everyday Life
Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Joseph A. Amato offers an account of daily existence that reminds us how important the quotidian is. Ranging across social, economic, and cultural history—as well as anthropology, folklore, and technology—he explores how and why the pattern of our lives has changed and developed over time. Amato examines the common facts and occurrences in lives from all spheres, whether of a pauper or a noble, a criminal or state official, or a lunatic or a philosopher. Such facts include basic aspects of hu...
Coal Cousins
The families of Joseph Anthony Amato and his wife, Cathy.
Rethinking Home
Joseph A. Amato proposes a bold and innovative approach to writing local history in this imaginative, wide-ranging, and deeply engaging exploration of the meaning of place and home. Arguing that people of every place and time deserve a history, Amato draws on his background as a European cultural historian and a prolific writer of local history to explore such topics as the history of cleanliness, sound, anger, madness, the clandestine, and the environment in southwestern Minnesota. While dedicated to the unique experiences of a place, his lively work demonstrates that contemporary local history provides a vital link for understanding the relation between immediate experience and the metamor...
