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.