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 facades of deep inner worlds.

While the story of the big has often been told, the story of the small has not yet even been outlined. With "Dust," Joseph Amato enthralls the reader with the first history of the small and the invisible. "Dust" is a poetic meditation on how dust has been experienced and the small has been imagined across the ages. Examining a thousand years of Western civilization--from the naturalism of medieval philosophy, to the artistry of the Renaissance, to the scientific and industrial revolutions, to the modern worlds of nanotechnology and viral diseases--"Dust" offers a savvy story of the genesis of the microcosm.
Dust, which fills the deepest recesses of space, pervades all earthly things. Throughout the ages it has been the smallest yet the most common element of everyday life. Of all small things, dust has been the most minute particulate the eye sees and the hand touches. Indeed, until this century, dust was simply accepted as a fundamental condition of life; like darkness, it marked the boundary between the seen and the unseen.
With the full advent of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and social control, dust has been partitioned, dissected, manipulated, and even invented. In place of traditional and generic dust, a highly diverse particulate has been discovered and examined. Like so much else that was once considered minute, dust has been magnified by the twentieth-century transformations of our conception of the small. These transformations--which took form in the laboratory through images of atoms, molecules, cells, and microbes--defined anew not only dust and the physical world but also the human body and mind. Amato dazzles the reader with his account of how thispowerful microcosm challenges the imagination to grasp the magnitude of the small, and the infinity of the finite.
"Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000"

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 metamorphosis of the world at large. In an era of encompassing forces and global sensibilities, "Rethinking Home "advocates the power of local history to revivify the individual, the concrete, and the particular. This singular book offers fresh perspectives, themes, and approaches for energizing local history at a time when the very notion of place is in jeopardy.
Amato explains how local historians shape their work around objects we can touch and institutions we have directly experienced. For them, theory always gives way to facts. His vivid portraits of individual people, places, situations, and cases (which include murders, crop scams, and taking custody of the law) are joined to local illustrations of the use of environmental and ecological history. This book also puts local history in the service of contemporary history with the examination of recent demographic, social, and cultural transformations. Critical concluding chapters on politics and literature--especially Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street "and Longfellow's "Hiawatha"--show how metaphor and myth invent, distort, and hold captive local towns, peoples, and places.

"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 measure of the suffering of others, while still remaining able to value his own suffering.

After distinguishing pain from suffering, Amato starts his work with the assumption that humanity must interpret and give meaning to its pains and sufferings. Amato examines the fundamental place of suffering, sacrifice, and victims in Greek and Christian cultures. Reaching the central object of his study, the modern mind, Amato shows how the reformist world view of the eighteenth century philosopher sought to reduce suffering to a matter of rational calculation and how the progressive views of the nineteenth century dedicated the most profound energies of society and state to the elimination of human suffering. Ironically, in the twentieth century this resulted in an increasingly hedonistic society that is preoccupied with suffering and its rights, victims and their claims. Historians, philosophers, political scientists, theologians, and lay people will all find a lively forum in Amato's work.

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 measure of the suffering of others, while still remaining able to value his own suffering. After distinguishing pain from suffering, Amato starts his work with the assumption that humanity must interpret and give meaning to its pains and sufferings. Amato examines the fundamental place of suffering, sacrifice, and victims in Greek and Christian cultures. Reaching the central object of his study, the modern mind, Amato shows how the reformist world view of the eighteenth century philosopher sought to reduce suffering to a matter of rational calculation and how the progressive views of the nineteenth century dedicated the most profound energies of society and state to the elimination of human suffering. Ironically, in the twentieth century this resulted in an increasingly hedonistic society that is preoccupied with suffering and its rights, victims and their claims. Historians, philosophers, political scientists, theologians, and lay people will all find a lively forum in Amato's work.