Joseph A. Amato

Joseph A. Amato (August 31, 1938, Detroit, Michigan) is a noted teacher, thinker, and author.

Amato received his B.A. in history from the University of Michigan in 1960; his M.A. in history from the Université Laval, Québec, in 1963; and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester in 1970. His undergraduate education was shaped, as we read in his memoir Bypass(Purdue University Press, 2000) and in an article he wrote "Stephen Tonsor and his historicism." Modern Age (Spring, 2008), while his graduate study was inspired by 19th-century European and Italian historian, A. W. Salomone (1916-1989). His dissertation, published as "Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World" (University of Alabama Press1975), was on the sources and plight of contemporary French Catholic thought in the first half of the 20th century. He also did post-doctoral study in the history of European cultures with Professor Eugen Weber] at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975-1976, whom he describes in a review essay, "Eugen Weber's France," Journal of Social History, Vol 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1992).

After teaching high school at Royal Oak, Michigan, Amato taught as instructor at Binghamton University and the University of California, Riverside. In 1969 Amato began teaching at Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) in Marshall, Minnesota. At this new and small college, characterized by every sort of cultural and institutional turbulence associated with the late sixties and even seventies—as described by "A New College on the Prairie"(1992)—he was a founder and chair of the History Department. He taught a range of courses in European intellectual and cultural history, in addition to social science and ethics. Amato was one of the architects of the university’s Rural Studies curriculum in the 1970s, a principal founder of the Society for Local and Regional History, and he eventually became the founder the Rural and Regional Studies and the Dean of Rural and Regional Studies. In his first decades at SMSU, Amato founded the local Minnesota Federation of Teachers union, supported and wrote on the Catholic Worker, non-violent Sicilian Social Reformer Danilo Dolci, and the Striking Bank Women of Willmar, Minnesota. He also established Crossings Press and, working in conjunction with the Southwest Minnesota Regional Research Center, supported over seventy publications on diverse places, farms, towns, and peoples, and ethnic, demographic,and geographic facets of life in Southwest Minnesota, including environmental history, rivers, floods, clandestine lives, murders,and crop scams. Amato retired from SMSU in 2003 as Professor emeritus of Rural and Regional Studies and of History.

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