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Published March 2019 | public
Journal Article

Everyday Life. How the Ordinary became Extraordinary [Book Review]

Brewer, John

Abstract

Joseph Amato's Everyday Life is an escalating, high speed survey (in 200 pages!) of everyday life from pre-history to the present. But this, as his extended acknowledgements make clear, is not so much an overview as a lengthy (and polemical) reflection on his life's work as an historian of the local, the material and the everyday, designed to offer "reasons for studying and writing everyday life…[as] a humane craft" (240). For Amato, this task is a moral imperative, in which the historian should work "to secure…home and family in heart and hearth and to save the uniqueness of place as a reservoir of variety in a time when the local, rural and...

Additional Information

© 2017 The Author. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Published: 09 September 2017. Book review of: Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary. By Joseph A. Amato (London: Reaktion Books, 2016. 256 pp.); ISBN: 9781780236636.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023