Everyday Life

Joseph A. Amato is Emeritus Professor of History and Rural and Regional Studies at Southwest Minnesota State University. He is the author of many cultural and intellectual studies, as well as works of local and regional history including Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible (2000), On Foot: A History of Walking (2004) and Surfaces, A History (2013).

Amato offers a bold historical account of daily existence across the ages. Beginning with societies of scarcity and ending with our own twenty-first-century lives, he ranges widely through topics as varied as walking and the charm of spices, and through time from early agriculture to mechanization and the modern urban existence . . . [a] challenging and thought-provoking introduction to change and continuity in daily life. - Bulletin of the Social History SocietyJoseph A. Amato makes a compelling case for exploring the complex history of everyday life. Drawing on an amazingly broad range of historical, cultural, anthropological, and literary sources, Amato pays keen attention to the interplay of place, landscape, and &#34things" on human experience and imagination. Like his previous books Everyday Life richly rewards the reader. It is a unique, reflective, and provocative essay that honors the richness of human life in all its variety. - Donald Yerxa, Professor Emeritus, Eastern Nazarene CollegeThis book combines impressively wide reading with a sense of how life was and is composed. Amato ranges widely through topics as varied as dirt and muck, walking, the charm of spices and through time periods from early agriculture to mechanization. The result is a thought-provoking introduction to change and continuity in daily life. - Peter Stearns, Emeritus Professor of History, George Mason UniversityIn Everyday Life Joseph A. Amato reflects on the complex and changing textures of everyday life, beginning with societies of scarcity and relative lack of change and ending with Amatos own American life of the 20th and 21st centuries. A work of wide-ranging erudition, it nonetheless offers food for reflection to the everyday reader today, for it lays out how life even in the very recent past differed from life in present-day societies of abundance and of seemingly unstoppable change. - Allan Megill, Professor of History, University of VirginiaBursting with observations, moving between the abstract and the concrete, and embracing both prose and poetry, the book itself is a product of a certain vision of everyday life. Amato makes generalizations only to contradict them, and he makes no bones about citing favorite sources while ignoring others. He refuses, in other words, the standardizing norms of the historical profession . . . - The American Historical Review