Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries

Abstract

Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Joseph A. Amato. Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary. London: Reaktion Books, 2016, 256 pp. References, acknowledgements, index. $25.00. Rebecca K. Shrum. In the Looking Glass: Mirrors & Identity in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 221 pp. Figures, acknowledgements, notes, and index. $54.95. Everyday histories, or daily histories, across time and space, ancient to modern, a Braudelian sweep of the world, all in 200 pages of text. Best to begin reading at the end. The acknowledgements. Joseph Amato tells us that "[n]eedless to say, my sense of the everyday has its deepest roots in my own childhood and family. Nostalgia [a powerful and positive characterization throughout this reflection] makes what was my secure and cared-for youth one and whole—and a standard of what a desirable youth should be" (p. 242). A brick house in Detroit, stay-at-home mom—"resourceful, quick-tempered and generous"; a "loyal, stoic father"; a neighborhood rich in trees and peopled by the children of Eastern European, Canadian and German immigrants; a job at age eleven as a caddy at Grosse Pointe Farms; a "public education and a democratic point of view, sharpened by a militant unionism and an unquestioned allegiance to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman"—all this has shaped a lifetime of writing social history and about daily life (p. 242). Amato came to think of his mother's family as "my American family" and his father's as "my Italian [family] (p. 242). On his mother's side, a family "who literally dug themselves west along the Great Lakes from the Erie Canal until in the 1850s they finally settled in Wisconsin" (p. 243); on his father's, more recent Sicilians from "the Madonie Mountains in northeastern Sicily" (p. 242). Autobiography and Amato's own family history—his families' journeys from traditional life to modern life—crop up throughout the book and provide background for his reflections on the history of daily life and methods of studying that history. Around the books he has read, the many he has written, and the perambulations of his family, Amato speculates about 10,000 years of changes in daily life, up to a moment when "village and peasant, local and regional societies [End Page 553] increasingly lost their autonomy and capacity to assimilate outside influences," a point in time where one's "[m]ind leaps traditional borders and temporal boundaries," and "follows imagination, affinity and empathy where they lead, making ordinary days of life extraordinary days of mind" (p. 187). His acknowledgements also cite one of his mentors, Eugene Weber, whose Peasants into Frenchmen, succinctly captured this story in a specific place and time; just as tellingly, among the four individuals Amato thanks for their role in helping him "democratically… celebrate the long and extraordinary making of everyone's everyday life" is poet and friend Dana Yost, excerpts of whose poems conclude the book, and suggest to Amato, and the reader, how "historians must follow poets in their approach to the everyday world" (p. 206). Everyday Life, then, is neither an attempt to define its subject fully nor a comprehensive "how-to-do-it" guide to writing about daily life. It provides instead an overarching template for talking about the history of daily life rooted in material culture and economics. Amato admires the work of Fernand Braudel, but gives more consideration to psychology, cultural history, and politics than the Annales school did. The schema is essentially tripartite—traditional, modern, and a contemporary world, a modern world in which we have become "strangers to our own past," the ordinary has become extraordinary, and the "fixed and bounded" has become the "unleased and boundless" (p. 194). The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution mark the extended transition from the first (traditional) to the second (modern) stage; the emergence of the contemporary self, awash in a world of choices that cut ties to place and past, brings us to our current stage in which "habit-packed nuclei at the centre of daily life no longer holds" (p. 195). The engine of change is "an increment...