Joseph A. Amato (born 1938) is an American author and scholar. Amato was a history professor and university dean of local and regional history. He has written extensively on European intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Southwestern Minnesota. Since retiring, he has continued publishing history books, as well as five poetry collections and his first novel.
After teaching high school at Royal Oak, Michigan, Amato was an instructor at Binghamton University and the University of California, Riverside. In 1969 Amato began teaching at the new Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) in Marshall, Minnesota (originally Southwest Minnesota State College). He was a founder and chair of the History Department, one of the architects of the university's Rural Studies curriculum in the 1970s, and a principal founder of the Society for Local and Regional History.[1] He established Crossings Press and, in conjunction with the Society for Local and Regional History, supported over seventy publications on demographic, environmental and geographic facets in Southwest Minnesota.[2] Amato retired from SMSU in 2003 as Professor Emeritus of Rural and Regional Studies and of History.
Writing career
Amato discussing his work
Collections of his writings, notebooks, interviews, and reviews of his writing are held at SMSU's regional research and history center and the Literary Manuscript Collections of the Elmer Anderson Library, at the University of Minnesota.[3] In addition to numerous reviews and articles in scholarly and popular journals, Amato's writing falls roughly into four fields:
First, local, regional, and rural history. Rethinking Home: The Case for Local History (2003) was widely reviewed[4] and featured at several national conferences. On multiple fronts he has continued to study, teach and write about local and regional history and the power of place in determining experience and identity.
Third, family, self, and community. Among his books in this area: Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History (2008) traces seven generations of his family's migrations from Europe, in Acadia, pre-revolutionary Massachusetts, the rural and industrial Midwest and the American West. Amato describes his youth in two memoirs, Bypass: A Memoir and Golf Beats Us All (And So We Love It).
Fourth, Amato's recent work includes poetry and his first novel. He has written five volumes of poetry, Buoyancies, A Ballast Master's Log;[6]My Three Sicilies: Stories, Poems, and Histories; Diagnostics: Poetics of Time; Towers of Aging (Crossings Press, 2020); and The Trinity of Grace (Legas Publishing, 2020). His first novel, Buffalo Man: Life of a Boy Giant on the Minnesota River, was published by Crossings Press in 2018.
Amato's books won have won him nominations, selections, and honors, of particular note the Minnesota Humanities Prize for Literature[7] and Prairie Star Award from the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council.[8]
Selected works
Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (University of Alabama Press, 1975; republished by Ave Maria Press, 2002[9]
Ethics, Living or Dead? Themes in Contemporary Values (Portals Press/ Crossings Press, 1982).[10]
Guilt and Gratitude: A History of the Origins of Modern Conscience (Greenwood Press, 1982).[11]
Death Book: Terrors, Consolations, Contradictions and Paradoxes (Ellis Press, Crossings Press, 1985).[12]
When Father and Son Conspire: A Minnesota Farm Murder (Iowa State University Press, 1988).[13]
Victims and Values: A History and Theory of Suffering, (Greenwood Press, 1990).[14]
Servants of the Land: God, Family, and Farm, The Trinity of Belgian Economic Folkways (Crossing Press, 1990).[15]
A New College on the Prairie: Southwest State University's First Twenty-Five Years, 1967–1992 (Crossings Pres, 1991.[16]
The Decline of Rural Minnesota, with John Meyer, (Crossings Press, 1993).[18]
To Call It Home: The New Immigrants of Southwestern Minnesota, with John Meyer, John Radzilowski, Donata DeBruyckere, and Anthony Amato (Crossings Press, 1996).[19]
Golf Beats Us All (And So We Love It) (Johnson Books, 1997). Finalist for the 1998 Minnesota Book Awards.[20]
Community of Strangers: Change, Turnover, Turbulence & the Transformation of a Midwestern Country Town, with John Radzilowski and assistance of John Meyer (Crossings Press, 1999).[21]
The Draining of the Great Oasis: An Environmental History of Murray County, Minnesota, ed. with Anthony Amato and Janet Timmerman (Crossings Press, 2001).[24]
^Reviews of Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World:
D'Aoust, Jean-Jacques (September 1976), "Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World. By Joseph Amato. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1975. xxiii + 215 pp. $9.50", Church History, 45 (3): 395–396, doi:10.2307/3164298, JSTOR3164298, S2CID162265619
Hellman, John W. (October 1976), The Catholic Historical Review, 62 (4): 659–660, JSTOR25019997{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
Isern, Thomas D. (December 1994), The American Historical Review, 99 (5): 1780–1781, doi:10.2307/2168574, JSTOR2168574{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
Steinson, Barbara J (1995), "The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus: the Buying and Selling of the Rural American Dream", The Annals of Iowa, 54 (3): 285–286, doi:10.17077/0003-4827.9946
