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 and an article on Stephen Tonsor, by historicism, while his graduate study was inspired by nineteenth-century European and Italian historian, A. W. Salomone. His dissertation, published as Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World, was on the sources and plight of contemporary French Catholic thought in the first half of the twentieth 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.
Amato taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of California, Riverside. In 1969 Amato began teaching at Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) in Marshall, Minnesota, where he was a founder and chair of the History Department. He taught a range of courses in European intellectual and cultural history and historiography. 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. Amato retired from SMSU as Professor emeritus of Rural and Regional Studies and of History
Amato made local, regional, and rural history an integral part of his ongoing inquiry into human experience and meaning. Rethinking Home: The Case for Local History (2003) was widely reviewed and featured at several national conferences.
A second and formative focus of Amato’s writing is European cultural and intellectual history as illustrated by Guilt and Gratitude and Victims and Values and most recently Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible, 2000, which won the Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction of 2000 and his On Foot: A Cultural History of Walking(2004) His books have translated into Italian, German, Korean, and other languages.
The third category of Amato’s work grows out of his personal, familial, and ethnic reflections. His recent book in this genre, A Memoir Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History (2008) how seven generations of his family are joined to the larger movements of the history of America. Amato further describes his family and youth in memoirs Bypass: A Memoir, Golf Beats Us All (And So We Love It). He offers a short history of his wife’s families, ethnicity, and region in his Coal Cousins: Rusyn and Sicilian Stories & Pennsylvania Anthracite Histories (2008).
Amato won the Minnesota Humanities Prize for Literature in 2005.
Amato's papers and materials are gathered in the Literary Manuscripts Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, located at 213 Andersen Library_222 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Mounier and Maritain: A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World, 1975.
Ethics, Living or Dead?, 1982.
Guilt and Gratitude: A History of the Origins of Modern Conscience, 1982.
Death Book, Terrors, Consolations, Contradictions and Paradoxes, 1985.
When Father and Son Conspire: A Minnesota Farm Murder, 1988.
Victims and Values: A History and Theory of Suffering, 1990.
Servants of the Land: God, Family, and Farm, The Trinity of Belgian Economic Folkways, 1990.
A New College on the Prairie: Southwest State University's First Twenty-Five Years, 1967-1992, 1991.
The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus, 1993.
The Decline of Rural Minnesota, with John Meyer, 1993.
To Call It Home: The New Immigrants of Southwestern Minnesota, with John Meyer, John Radzilowski, Donata DeBruyckere, and Anthony Amato, 1996.
Golf Beats Us All (And So We Love It), 1997.
Community of Strangers: Change, Turnover, Turbulence & the Transformation of a Midwestern Country Town, with John Radzilowski and assistance of John Meyer, 1999.
Bypass: A Memoir, 2000.
Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible, 2000.
The Draining of the Great Oasis: An Environmental History of Murray County, Minnesota, ed. with Anthony Amato and Janet Timmerman, 2001.
Rethinking Home: The Case for Local History, 2002.
A Place Called Home: Writings on the Midwestern Small Town, 2003 anthology edited by Richard Davies, Joseph Amato and David Pichaske, 2003.
On Foot: A Cultural History of Walking, 2004.
Southwest Minnesota: A Place of Many Places, written with David Pichaske, 2007.
Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008.