No place is a place, wrote Wallace Stegner, until the things that happened in it, are remembered in ballads, legends, monuments, and history books. And the most important place of all, according to historian Joseph Amato, is home.
But local history is an endangered species, a craft that struggles with the constant change that is today. Amato's new book, "Rethinking Home," is a work of a teacher, intent on the idea that home's history still matters as long as we find new ways to think about it.
Amato tells us how to judge the wealth of a town, weighing records of bank deposits against the arrival of new citizens. He tells us how to listen to the sounds of yesterday, to mills and factories, to children at play, to time, as it passes like cars on a nearby interstate.
