Local History in its comparative international context
John Beckett
Director and General Editor, Victoria County History
Local history is widely practiced, but how, and by whom, and to what end?
1 By definition local, or regional, means something which is not ‘national’, and by practice it has tended not to encourage cross border discussion despite having a trans-national element as the result of migration. The sub-national basis of local history has tended as a consequence to mean that our knowledge of ‘practice’ is weak in an obvious comparative sense: we know, or could guess, that there is local history everywhere, but we know little about what it is, how it was practised, and who are the practitioners. As the
Norwegian local historian Harald Winge noted in 1995: ‘Generally, the Norwegian discussion has been relatively inward-looking. One indeed gets the impression that this has also been the case in other countries’.
2 Unlike most academic disciplines, local history does not have an established network of scholars who can share experience and practice, let alone an effective means of reaching out to the myriads of amateur practitioners across the globe who are working on a locality. This paper addresses issues raised at a conference in
July 2009. The list is not comprehensive, but it provides an agenda which is relevant to the study of local history across a range of countries and cultures.
3
1 This paper reports on an International Symposium convened at the Institute of Historical Research, 7-8
July 2009 by the Victoria County History to examine some of the major issues of interest to local historians. Delegates attended from the United States, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Hungary, Norway,
England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. I should like to thank all of them for contributing towards the ideas outlined in this paper.
2 Harald Winge, ‘Local History’, in W.H. Hubbard, Jan Eivind Myhre, Trond Nordby and Solve Sagner, eds., Making a Historical Culture: Historiography in Norway (Oslo, Scandinavian Universities Press, 1995), 254
3 The unpublished proceedings of an earlier conference have also been made available to me in the course of preparing this report: ‘Academic Local History and the Concept of Heritage: Towards a European
Model’, University of Gloucestershire, 26-28 July 2001.
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The link between national history and local history is straightforward for an English local historian. The boundaries of the state have been fixed for a thousand years, and within the state county boundaries and parish boundaries are often of similar longevity although many new urban parishes were created in the Victorian period, and since
1974 various local government boundary changes have taken place.
Perhaps because of this security, the main discussion over the past five or six decades has been the relationship between studying the individual community through time, and conceptualising local history in terms of problems or issues.
4 In other words, in longer established states, and here we can include Norway as well as
England, there is little or no sense of a fragmented historic past.
5
Beyond England, but not necessarily beyond the British Isles, the interface between local and national boundaries is rather more contested. We tend once they exist to forget that boundaries might be quite recent, and they might remain contested. We tend also to be boundary defined, partly because much of our research material comes from within government-constructed boundaries such as parishes and registration districts. Bearing these provisos in mind, three issues stand out: the role of local history in states which are of relatively recent construction, to which the political priorities of the state constitute a subsidiary theme; the role of local history in states where settler communities have imposed themselves on an indigenous community; and the role of local history in nations which are a part of a state which encompasses more than one nation.
These issues may overlap in some instances, but they can be deconstructed in such a way as to provide a sense of the complexities which confront the local historian depending on the
4 The debate started with the foundation in 1948 of the Department of English Local History at the
University of Leicester. Its initial phase was summarised by W.G. Hoskins, ‘The writing of local history’,
History Today, 2(7), July 1952,489. A contrary viewpoint was offered by W.R. Powell, ‘Local History in
Theory and Practice’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 31 (1958), 41-8
5 Winge, ‘Local History’, 241
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wider conditions in which they may be working. They constitute the main sections of this paper, prior to the discussion of a number of other broad ranging themes of relevance to the wider local historical community.
Local history in states which are of relatively recent construction
The role of local historians in justifying the existence of a state may not be one we instantly recognise, but it is a role which is not as problematic to unearth as we might initially believe. The work of
William Harrison and William Camden, the great sixteenth century
English antiquaries, was set in the context of finding a means of justifying the post-Reformation state, which had unilaterally cut its ties with Rome: the Church was now of England rather than being the Church in England. They sought to uncover England’s origins and to strip away centuries of accumulated myth and legend that passed for history. They sought accuracy, and an escape from the more fanciful theories relating particularly to the Anglo-Saxon period, but England was a secure state which did not need to justify its existence and so accuracy could be prized above the presentation of a ‘heritage’ myth.
Elsewhere the importance of origin myths as justification for the existence of a modern state has been common in the writing of national history, whether in the efforts of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland to trace its routes directly to St Patrick, or the efforts of settler communities in the United States, Australia and
South Africa, to provide themselves with a mythical past which justified the modern state. The sixteenth century search for
‘England’ soon diversified into county histories, but these were viewed as part of a wider whole – even the modern Victoria County
History (VCH) was in origin a history of the nation from the county
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and parish upwards – a slightly different meaning to the usual conceptualisation of history from below.
The emergence of the professional historian from the later nineteenth century, notably in England and the United States, was similarly linked to the state. In a wide ranging article in the
American Historical Review, Celia Applegarth pointed out that ‘the whole process by which the writing of history established itself as a profession in the modern era has been closely interwoven with the making and legitimating of nation-states’.
6 In England, it is no surprise to find that the professional historians studied the public records in a Public Record Office founded in 1862, nor that their premier journal founded in 1886 was the English Historical Review.
They shunned local history, except in so far as it provided them with examples which would ‘throw light on the general history of the country’.
7
Similarly, in the United States, members of the academy distanced themselves from those considered amateurs, to form the American
Historical Society. All this, we might argue, was in the nineteenth century, but Stefan Berger expressed concern only shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall that ‘reunification threatens the plurality of views on German history and poses the serious danger of a return to the narrow concern with “national history” and “national identity” which characterised German historiography for almost two centuries’.
8
Something similar happened in Russia where local and regional history was more or less suppressed in Soviet times. The collapse of
6 Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in
Modern Times’, American Historical Review, 104/4 (1999), 1159-60
7 Anon, ‘Proceedings’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2 (1884), 152, 160
8 Stefan Berger, ‘Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after reunification’, Past and Present 148
(1995), 187-222
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communism led to a rebirth of local and regional studies in Russia.
David Saunders expresses it on the lines that the Russians are at last beginning to do local history in the way westerners do it! G.M.
Hamburg has argued that one of the main waves of historiographical change in post-1991 Russia has been an interest in the many regional subdivisions of the tsarist state.
9
In the eastern bloc more generally after the fall of communism in
1989 there was a marked revival of interest in local history and a strong demand for erecting local monuments, stronger attachment to local communities or smaller geographical areas. Applegate has argued that ‘the cases of post-war western Germany and post-
Communist Russia and eastern Germany ‘suggest an unexplained capacity of regional forms of collective identification to come to the fore in times of crisis and collapse. A profitable direction for further research might be to investigate why’.
10 As we shall see, it clearly has something to do with establishing identity.
Self-evidently the nation-state is a construct imposed on an existing structure of communities which may retain their distinctiveness, depending on the relationship of the state to the localities. Since the formation of states has taken different paths, it is no surprise to find that the nature of local history has evolved in different ways and for different ends. In England, the nation state has existed for more than a millennium, and ‘local’ has been interpreted in relation to the governmental constructs imposed by the state, namely counties and parishes. Teasing out non-county/parish local relationships has been remarkably difficult, and regions have been
9 G.M. Hamburg, reviewing Robert Crews on Islam in the Russian Empire and Aleksei Miller on the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, Kritika, 9/2 (2008), 409. Susan Smith-Peter, ‘How to Write a
Region: Local and Regional Historiography’, Kritika, 5/3 (2004), 527-42; Aleksei Miller, ‘Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm’, Kritika, 5/1 (2004), 7-26.
Information from David Saunders.
10 Applegate, ‘Europe of Regions’, 1179
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relatively insignificant, largely because they have no historic currency. As recently as 2004 an attempt by the Labour government to introduce democratically-elected regional assemblies in England to parallel devolution in Scotland and Wales collapsed in the face of public apathy in the north-east, which was considered the most fertile territory for regional ‘independence’.
11
This lack of local feeling at the political level partly explains the concentration of some of the pioneers of local history in post-war
England on regions as areas which had some coherence within the landscape. In more recent times historians at the Centre for English
Local History at the University of Leicester have effectively abandoned what turned out to be a futile search for regional consciousness in favour of studying settlement patterns and groups of villages. Regional studies are designed to help us understand the place and its inhabitants, and to ask different questions about the country other than those based on the nation as a political entity.
Problems and issues, rather than chronology in the sense of the rise and fall of a particular community are, in this sense, the true territory of the local historian.
The changing values at Leicester demonstrate one key point which is that no one person or organisation decides what local history is: rather, it is a moving target in which priorities change as context and parameters change. The rise of the new social history, or of cultural history, as issues for discussion, have impacted on local history just as they have on other disciplines.
12
11 Bill Lancaster, Diana Newton and Natasha Vall, eds., An Agenda for Regional History (2007), 23-41
12 This awkwardness over who defines the subject and how far is it beholden to academic discussion originating in universities, came up on numerous occasions during the ‘Local History in Britain after
Hoskins’ conference at Leicester, 9-12 July 2009. See also R.C. Richardson, ‘English Local History and
American local History: some comparisons’, in R.C. Richardson, ed., The Changing Face of English Local
History (2000), 206-7, 209-10
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In much of Europe the strength of the nation state is loosely determined by its longevity, and regions often remain significant in historical enquiry. In France the ongoing influence of regions is partly because of distance from the capital and partly because the central government in Paris was never as strong a focus for the nation as London was in England. Many modern Bretons still tend to think Brittany first and France second, and this inevitably impacts on their approach to their history. Germany and Italy, both recent national constructs, have strong regional history traditions. The landesgeschicte remains the key to local and regional historical study and commitment in Germany. This in turn raises questions about the impact of local study on the state. Hartmut Pogge von
Strandmann has explored the case in relation to Germany for reinterpreting national political histories in the light of local and regional political cultures.
13
The politics of the state may also dictate the way in which local history is constructed. In Hungary the values which individuals and communities bring to local history have necessarily been affected by change. A carefully worked out programme of county and town histories was started in 1896 and 26 counties had been covered by
1914. But after the war, Hungary’s borders changed, and most of its main towns such as Zagreb and Bratislava were now outside its historic boundaries. Following the Second World War the situation changed again with a new movement best characterised as knowledge of the homeland. By the 1970s further town biographies had been written of those places which remained within the borders of Hungary, and then everything changed again with the collapse of
Communism. Once again all the major communities felt obliged to
13 Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Formation of Local Identities in Towns and Cities in Imperial
Germany’, University of Gloucestershire, July 2001.
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commission something by someone, as an expression of identity, but that is little consolation to those people of Hungarian descent now living in areas which are outside of Hungary’s modern borders.
Even the language is changing: histories of Bratislava have been published in both Hungarian and Slovak.
In the United States David Russo argued in Families and
Communities (1974) for a loosening of the national history framework in favour of a more grass roots approach, a kind of history studied through smaller units because the nation is a relatively recent construct arbitrarily imposed as a framework on the country’s past.
Local history in states where settler communities have imposed themselves on an indigenous community
In many parts of the world the modern community is a combination of indigenous and settler communities, and the relationship between them may be worked out in terms of local history. Where a settler community has taken over land previously owned by an indigenous community, local history has often been written in self-justificatory tones, partly to create an illusion of longevity in order to claim land.
In both Australia and South Africa, settler communities wrote local history which emphasised the new community they had established, the various things which had been done for the first time and which were new, all of which were an attempt to justify the settlers through the improvements they brought to the area. Frank Borgiano argued that the central dynamic of Australian local history is about understanding the position of settlers in the years after 1788, and the ethical and practical issues in relation to the groups they displaced.
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In the initial phase of settlement the indigenous communities were ignored. Their histories only began to be investigated once the settler community felt secure in its own existence. In post-Soweto
South Africa since 1976 attempts have been made to write local history which would appeal to all types of people in the cities, including Afrikaans, Boers and the coloured community. Similar issues were raised in the United States by the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, forcing Americans to ask questions about the ethnic groups within their society and why had they been written out of the country’s history.
The local history of non-literate indigenous communities, or at least communities which had no written records, was particularly problematic to reconstruct at least before techniques for studying oral testimony were developed, hence the importance of the publication in 1976 of Alex Haley’s book Roots. Nation states were arbitrarily imposed on much of Africa during the nineteenth century scramble for Africa, with little or no regard for tribal or ethnic interest groups because of a (misplaced) belief that in a democratic state such groups would happily live side by side. Much of Africa continues to struggle with such Eurocentric imperialism, hence the occasional, but extremely bloody, ethnic cleansing that blights the
Continent, most recently (2007-8) in Kenya. The impact of imposing national boundaries on social groups with no shared history and heritage, was clear following the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia, particularly with the various rivalries involving Serbia, Croatia, and
Kosovo.
It is easy, but probably misleading, to condemn settlers for directing local history along self-justificatory lines. Frank Bongiorno, who is Australian, has argued that local history will always be buffeted by local considerations. In today’s global village, far from
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eradicating local and regional identities and creating an homogenous citizenry, local history has brought about a renewal of local identifications, in which family and community are revived as powerful markers of personal and group identity. Australian local history practice came to be deeply influenced by both the emergence of a university-based historical profession in the 1950s, and by the almost simultaneous development of the new social history. History from below thrived on access to a body of international scholarship and local involvement in the Australian communities in which they lived and worked. This in turn led to the creation of an Australian history of place in which professional historical practice is married to community engagement.
National events have often served to boost local interest: in the
United States, for example, in the context of celebrations in the
1960s and 1970s of the centenary of the Civil War and bi-centenary of the Declaration of Independence in 1976, or in Hungary with the millenary celebrations of the Hungarian Conquest in 1896. Such celebrations are clearly problematic in terms of the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples: how, for example, do native American Indians feel about celebrating the Declaration of
Independence, or Southern Blacks about being taught Western
Civilisation in college? As Michael Kammen has expressed it, the impact is on both the conquered people and the people who conquer since their perception of the local will also be coloured by the community they have entered.
14
It seems at least possible that the growth of public history in the
United States, Australia, and elsewhere, but only belatedly in
Britain, reflects the need to project a particular historical image in
14 Michael Kammen, ‘Changes and Opportunities in writing State and local History’, in C. Kammen, ed.,
The Pursuit of Local History: readings in theory and practice (1996), 130, 132
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local communities. Public history originated in the 1970s in the
United States partly as a result of the number of Ph.D students who could not find academic work, and who were encouraged to move into museums, galleries, archives and other areas of heritage with an outward-facing remit to the community. M.A. degrees were introduced to provide professional training. In North America the formation in 1976 of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) by scholars interested in training students to work outside the academy, in historic preservation, in state, city and county historical societies, and in archives. These historians also brought the new social history to a wider audience, through studies of ethnicity, gender, the environment, social conditions, and the history of the family.
15
Progress has been much slower in England, despite the rise of heritage over the same period, and the expansion of television history, including the BBC’s much admired ‘Who Do You Think You
Are’ programme. A recently announced M.A. in Public History at
Royal Holloway College, Egham, is one of the first serious attempts to conceptualise the subject in an academic context in this country.
The ethical problems around public history – to what extent do heritage professionals provide a sanitised picture which fits with what people might want to hear? – remain to be tackled. And we must not forget that local history has also been discovered by tourism in the form of heritage, and consequently ought to be presented accurately and consistently, rather than – as is often the case – adapted to suit the prejudices of the presumed audience: the concept sometimes referred to as nostalgia history.
15 Constance B. Schulz, ‘Large Questions in Small Places: local history as public history in the US’,
University of Gloucestershire, July 2001.
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The role of local history in nations which are a part of a state which encompasses more than one nation
Some nations exist within states which may or may not recognise their independence. This is not just about arbitrarily drawn boundaries, as in Africa. In England, the extent of state power exercised from London, and stretching beyond the national boundary to incorporate Wales, Ireland and Scotland over time, has led both to uniformity in approach (counties, parishes and so forth) but eventually to distinctive regional pulls away from London; hence, Southern Irish independence in 1921, and more recently
Scottish self-government (however limited in practice), and the
Welsh Assembly.
In Wales, it is possible to argue that the country is both a state in itself, and also a local dimension to British history. Wales may be a nation with a distinctive history, language and culture of its own, and national histories have been written of great distinction which illuminate the emergence of modern Wales. Local historians have sought to emphasise the importance of distinctive and ‘local’ dimensions of important trends and have developed a valuable
‘county’ and ‘local’ history of Wales, which makes it appear as something of a European nation. Both the local and national history of Wales is subject to conflicting interpretations among Welsh historians, partly because of their different approaches to cultural, linguistic and political concerns. In turn this means that sometimes what are fundamentally local experiences are on occasion wrongly interpreted and understood to be a ‘national’ experience.
Andrew Edwards picked up a point which is probably true of all the countries of the British Isles in arguing that Welsh local history suffers because it is regarded in academic terms as local and
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therefore not of international relevance. He argued that at a time when with devolution the history of the Welsh nation might be expected to be at its most significant – the national history of Wales is being simplified and mythologized to meet the political ends of the present. He pointed out the relative ‘newness’ of Welsh history
(since about 1970 in academic terms), and the tendency of outsiders to lump the whole country into one, missing the significant differences between, for example, north and south
Wales.
These differences are also reflected in the local study area. Post-
Conquest England was organised by parishes, physical areas which have no necessary rationale that we can distinguish today, and the boundaries of which had regularly to be ‘beaten’ in order to establish where they were. Towns were areas where groups of people gathered, but they were collections of parishes which at some point received from the Crown a charter enabling them to have a separate form of local government often known as a county borough, in other words a town which had the same self governing rights as a county. This rural emphasis led to counties and parishes being the original local study areas, and that in turn was reflected in the way local history developed. Much the same occurred in the other parts of the British Isles, although the influence of the Roman
Catholic church on Ireland influenced the way local history was studied – notably through the parish priest.
Norway has also had both county and town histories in the past, but in the twentieth century the specialism came to be in the farm and family history, a form of genealogical history which took as its root the longevity of farming families over many centuries, and a conviction that each community should have both a farm history and a general community history. The dominant form of settlement
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in Norway has been the individual farm rather than the village, because it can be studied individually through written material in public archives. Each farm’s history can be studied for at least 300-
400 years.
16
These local approaches, as in Ireland and Norway, reflect the wider issue of identity. Much local history has been about cultivating or building identity, whether it is the local historical societies in the late eighteenth century United States, or the sense that individuals identify with the community in which they live, with a proportionate strength of attachment depending on size. The local history yearbooks in Norway are read by proportionately many more people in the suburbs and rural communities than, for example, in Oslo.
Potentially, and perhaps contradictorily, globalisation may also bring a stronger attachment to localities. Frank Bongiano saw the ideal as being for local historians to explain specific features in the past of local societies and economies, and argued that there should be a mutual influence between local studies and general works on settlement history or national overviews. This remains a task for the future, but it is worth noting that the current British government pays attention to local heritage in terms of a way of building communities. It might be that there is a role here for the local historian which will bring academic understanding into the evolution of local heritage – in effect, if not in name, public history.
So far in this paper I have concentrated on three key issues which came through in the conference discussions, but I want now to turn to three others which, arguably, provoked less discussion but which, even so, underpinned much of the debate. These are definitions, insofar as they are different from the discussion so far, sources, and
16 Winge, ‘Local History’.
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the relationship of professional and amateur historians in the field of local history.
Definitions
Who decides what is and is not, local history? This is hardly a new or original question. It was posed by Carol Kammen in introducing a compilation of essays on US local history published in 1996 in which she noted that Hoskins and Finberg at Leicester had been the first localists to try to devise a scheme for local history, and she followed their lead to suggest broad topics that might be considered as relevant to local history in its interpretive phase, such as population change, decision making, domestic life and culture, community competition, and community activism.
17
Of course, each generation rethinks its priorities, in local history as much as in any other area, and at Leicester for example current and future generations of local historians are now seeking to illuminate research themes which run through questions relating to different types of landscape and settlement, and are not primarily local in the sense of being concerned only with particular places. The 2001 conference also ran into definitional uncertainty, concluding that:
All papers recognized a close relationship between the immediate community and/or parish boundaries as well as county units and regional designations for rural locales. All these units were treated as Local History. When speaking of cities, a different organizational approach may be required.
Here a definition of Local History that recognizes a common urban ‘experience’ is crucial, especially where peoples from a variety of ethnic and national backgrounds are represented.
Not all the presentations addressed the question of whether urban Local History has special characteristics or problems.
17 Carol Kammen, ‘Local History – in search of common threads’, in Kammen, ed., Pursuit of Local History,
14-15
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The development of economic history as a separate subject area, particularly in the 1930s and beyond, led to a new focus for local history in England. The VCH in its earliest volumes had carried general sections on economic history, and around 1900 Norwegian historians turned their attention towards the country’s economic and social local history, following the conclusion of the struggle over union with Sweden. It is perhaps no surprise that economic history was the catalyst for non-national professional history, because it sought to explain national phenomena, particularly the process of industrialisation, through local and regional evidence. Primarily, in
England, it did so through the Adult Education movement before
Economic History became a separate discipline in the universities.
18
This in turn raises questions about the role of urban history in promoting local history. In the United States the importance of urban history as local history has developed since the 1930s when the first major studies of cities, using local sources, were written by professional historians. This interest in cities was significantly influenced by the Annales school, and in England by CAMPOP, to the point where R.C. Richardson has argued that local history had become so inextricably linked with urban history in the USA that most of the classic 20th century local histories in the US deal with towns.
19 Russo specifically referred to his 1988 book, Keepers of
Our Past, as focussing throughout ‘on the general histories of towns and cities and on their authors’.
20 The same is true of South Africa where town and city histories date back to the 1890s, and in
Australia where local history is town history (notably the six state
18 John Beckett, Writing Local History (2007), 91-4
19 Richardson, English Local History , 205-6
20 David Russo, Keepers of Our Past (1988), 5
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capitals), and for a long time there was a tendency to see everything beyond these simply as ‘the bush’.
The emphasis on urban history contrasts strongly with the rural theme highlighted in local history in England. Urban history was associated with laudatory accounts which emphasised the success of the town and the positive roles played by its mayors and aldermen. In this they were like the early state histories in the USA, which were ‘like the national story, the overarching state narrative traditionally focused on great individuals, showed political and economic growth, and celebrated the bravery, ingenuity, perseverance, and marvels of the journey from a simpler past to a more complex and sophisticated present’.
21
By contrast, the first generation of professional practitioners at
Leicester, Hoskins, Thirsk and Everitt, were all best known for their interests in rural history, while Finberg championed of the eight volume Cambridge Agrarian History of England and Wales.
Americans tend, as a result, to think Hoskins and his fellow English landscape historians were too narrowly focussed and insufficiently open to debate. Carol Kammen considers the Leicester school’s origins, decline and fall definition outmoded and confining.
22 Is local history based on a locale, rather than the history of individuals, or on the relationship between events, places and people? People do not just have roots they also have feet, and many are likely to live their lives out in different places over different time periods. This makes us essentially rootless, and our ‘local history’ may not be place dependent in the manner which is sometimes assumed.
23 This is especially true of migrant communities for whom even national history may be a misnomer.
21 Annette Atkins, Creating Minnesota (Minnesota, 2007), xi
22 Richardson, ‘English Local History’, 206-10
23 Keith Snell, Parish and Belonging: community, identity and welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1960 (2006)
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These conditions suggest we need to attach importance to stories of lived individual experience which is not hampered by formal boundaries. Taking individual lives seriously is the challenge in a highly mobile society. To understand any place we have to understand the importance of impermanent people. So how do we handle the fact that studying a place does not represent many people’s understanding because they may have moved about, so what is their local history because it might vary at different points in life?
Here, the role of ethnography within local history is clearly important in emphasising the importance of ‘memory’ in reconstructing the local past. Local historians working on the west coast of Ireland have made use of ethnographical and social anthropological techniques to reconstruct the past, and similar approaches have been used in Scotland, South Africa and Australia.
In communities with little written record, oral testimony becomes critical as a means of reconstructing the past, and individual experiences are important as a way of understanding that past, whatever the pitfalls associated with this type of approach. Slavery projects often rely on memory, and these become trans-national approaches when an interest is taken in the origins of the slaves.
How is local history distinct from other, related subjects? The most obvious of these is family history. Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that family history, at least in the form of manor lordships, has been central to local history in England since its earliest beginnings.
Wherever the records make it possible, family history has turned out to be a popular pursuit, and many of those who take it up simply out of curiosity go on to take qualifications in the subject, including Masters degrees. Family history can, like local history,
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shed light on wider issues such as the condition of the poor in earlier generations, the shift of population from land to town, and in more recent generations the transformation of material conditions, professionalisation, home ownership and so forth.
24 Work using family history data has been used in England, but family and local historians retain a slightly frosty relationship: local history is respectable to professionals, but family history is not, although professionals often draw on the findings of family historians.
25
A second related subject is another growth area within academe over the past two or three decades: Environmental History.
Environmental history is an obvious bedfellow for local historians. It has long overlapped with natural history from the days of John
Aubrey’s writings on Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, to the Victoria
County History, in which the first volume of each county set was largely devoted to natural history. The natural world was viewed as part of local history and antiquarian studies, and the United States local historian Joseph Amato has visualised the rethinking of settlement in terms of environmental history, suggesting that this should help us in studying and understanding landscape. In modern
Leicester terms this is perhaps covered by the interest in settlement, but it can also be seen as a way of approaching rural history, particularly in the context of sustainability and biodiversity.
26
There is a further question to be asked about the relationship of local history to broader historical trends. Where, in this mix, do were find the new social history, and the new cultural history, and their impact on local history? In 1999 George and Yamina Sheeran published an article in the British Association for Local History’s
24 Joseph Amato, Jacob’s Well: a case for Rethinking Family History (2008)
25 C. Pooley and J. Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (1998)
26 Joseph Amato, Rethinking Home: a Case for Writing Local History (2002), ch 2
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journal The Local Historian in which they argued that local history had been under-theorised, and specifically that there had been no proper engagement with the post-modernist debate which was engaging the attention of many academic historians. They pointed out quite rightly that there had been no real attempt to isolate the distinguishing characteristics or discipline of local history, that discussion over definition was rare and was often taken for granted, and that as a result local historians were failing to appreciate the extent to which historians generally were struggling to come to terms with the idea that much of the past has already been lost, or was never recorded, leaving us with only a residue. Local historians, the Sheerans suggested, had hardly begun to explore the philosophical problems of using primary sources to ‘reconstruct’ the past: ‘we might be re-inventing it [the past of any locality] in our own image for our own time’.
27 The Sheerans’ article was controversial, but readers of the Local Historian were at least presented with some of the issues which were being openly discussed among professional historians.
28
Local history has always been understood to be multi-disciplinary, at least since the work of Hoskins on landscapes, but it clearly is crucial in some contexts to engage with other disciplines which work to other agendas. This is clear in the case of ethnography, particularly in communities such as Australia where the settler community eventually had to come to terms with the ethical issues relating to the displaced group. Aboriginal history has tended to be personalised because of the documentary shortfall. In South Africa academic interest in the indigenous community dates largely from
Soweto in 1976.
27 George and Yanina Sheeran, ‘Reconstructing local history’, Local Historian, 29 (4) (1999), 256-62
28 For responses see Local Historian 29 (3) (1999), 187, 259; 30 (2), 125. See also K. Tiller, English Local
History: The State of the Art (1998), 22-3.
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Sources
Surprisingly for a conference of this type, the source materials from which local historians work in different places were barely mentioned. David Dickson made the point that the role of counties and provinces in Ireland was dictated by sources which were collected for government purposes, when local historians might feel that a different basis for collection would help them in their work, but few other mentions of sources were made despite the obvious differences in terms of access to sources, the survival of paper resources and the form that they took, and the extent to which they have been censored in the past.
Much of the work of local historians depends on access to data, and the quality of the data, as well as its availability, is crucial to our ability to ‘do’ local history. I am reminded of the fact that English local history has flourished since the opening of record offices, notably post 1945: access to sources is a key ingredient of our work. On the other hand many documents were lost in Japan during the Second World War as a result of the need to conserve paper, and the first national archives were founded only in 1950s and
1960s with an equivalent of the English TNA (The National Archives) only in 1971: the Japanese equivalent of English county archives date only from the 1980s.
In many parts of the world there are some relatively standard sources such as censuses, birth and death records, newspapers, family manuscripts, local government papers, maps and so forth, but the differences in quality and the methodologies for using the materials remains to be tested on another occasion.
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Amateur v professional.
The relationship between professional historian and amateur local history practitioner is a complex one, and it came up on many occasions during the conference. It is worth noting that the 2001 conference found itself facing the same issues:
What is the role of the local historian, whether academic or nonacademic, in fostering a desire to understand and pursue one’s identity through Local History? What organizational links can be forged between Local History societies and interest groups, local government and educational institutions to encourage individual and community interest in its history as
‘local’, but not parochial.
The development of the profession of historian towards the end of the nineteenth century had significant implications for local historians. With the academy came a view that the history of the nation state, studied from the public records, was the only proper history. Whereas most history had been local history, even if it took the form of antiquarian history, the local historian was marginalised
– fit only to provide the examples which would serve to justify the arguments and hypotheses developed by the professional. The result over time was that nation-state history was written by professional historians, either university or archive based, and local history was written by amateurs who were, in general, considered to be outside the academy, although in England a few ‘gentleman’ scholars were allowed fellowship of the Royal Historical Society.
Local historians probably did not worry overmuch about their exclusion. Their arena was the local historical society. In the United
States, the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791) and the New
York Historical Society (1804) were pioneer state organisations which set about collecting manuscripts, print and visual materials,
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and acted as forums for the discussion of papers on historical topics. They also, of course, were about creating their own histories.
Individual state organisations in this form paralleled the English county societies, both historical (often including archaeology and antiquities) and printing of documents. The earliest date from the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and they were ubiquitous by the 1870s and 1880s.
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This trend towards exclusivity was not universal. The Hungarian local histories written 1896-1914 were all the work of professional historians, and even today in Norway 90 per cent of all local histories, both rural and urban, are the work of academic historians.
There is a long and much respected tradition of academic local history writing in Finland, and the level of output achieved is regarded in the Baltic as being one of the highest in the world along with England and Norway.
30 Academic historians are also much respected for their local work in Japan.
In the United States the centenary in 1876 of the revolution created considerable interest in local history, suggesting perhaps that the way states celebrate, or not, their statehood may have an impact on the practice of local history. County and city historical organisations were founded, and books were published on counties and regions. This was a form of local celebration of national events, and no one doubts that both then and subsequently local history is the province of both professional and non-professional historians, but what is the relationship between them? In straightforward promotion terms, is local history academically respectable, as opposed to national or international history, and does it matter?
Andrew Edwards suggested that Welsh history has suffered because
29 C.R.J. Currie and C.P. Lewis, eds., A Guide to English County Histories (1994)
30 Tapio Salminen, and Jarmo Peltola, ‘Challenging the tradition: Academic History Writing and Local
History in Finland Today’, University of Gloucestershire, July 2001.
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of the modern preoccupation with international history in the British
Isles. Elsewhere the picture is less clear cut.
With the growth of the academy, local historians took refuge in their societies, which themselves came into union through associations.
In the USA the American Association for State and Local History was founded in 1904, providing the context for each state to have its own historical society, some of which were publicly funded. The
Norwegian Association of Local History founded in 1920, has 421 local history associations as its members, comprising 80,000 individuals. Its purpose is to stimulate interest in and knowledge of local history and cultural heritage. The organization publishes
Heimen. There are another 150-200 local associations that are not affiliated with the national association. Altogether, the local history associations make up a strong popular movement in Norway. The
Norwegian Institute of Local History, founded in 1955/6, is an independent public institution under the Ministry of Culture.
31 Its purpose is to promote local and regional activity through research and documentation.
The modern local history movement started in Sweden around 1900 as a kind of protest against the industrialisation process and a defence for rural lifestyles. Local organisations were set up as well as open air museums inspired by Skansen in Stockholm. In 1916 a national organisation was established, called Samfundet för hembygdsvård. This name was later changed to Riksförbundet för hembygdsvård and the early association was turned into a national organisation, known today as Sveriges Hembygdsförbund (Swedish
Local Heritage Federation). More than 1,800 local heritage societies with almost half a million members are affiliated.
31 Winge, ‘Local History’, 243
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The parallel institution in England was the Standing Conference for
Local History, founded in 1949 to provide an organisation which would draw together and provide a forum for the numerous local history societies which existed by that time. Since 1982 it has been known as the British Association for Local History, and it acts as an umbrella body for local historical societies. It has individual and society membership, but few professional historians attend its meetings, and those that do are much more likely to have backgrounds in adult education than in mainstream History departments.
It may be that Americans have had less difficulty than the British with the term amateur. David Russo’s Keepers of Our Past (1988) celebrated generations of antiquarians who laboured productively in the field of local history (and reprinted sources now lost). Carol
Kammen has written of a shared community, whereas in England the local historian John Marshall, who spent most of his career as a professional historian at Lancaster University, drew a clear distinction between the antiquarian and professional historians.
32
David Danbom has raised particular issues over the relationship between professional scholar and amateur, and on the role of
‘professional’ history in relation to the US academy. In an article about the role of the Minnesota Historical Society in developing an interpretative centre at St Anthony Falls, he noted that ‘there is little or no history of the local community and the state being done in American universities these days, especially at elite institutions such as the University of Minnesota’. In the past, scholars at leading universities played a role in the local history of the place in which their institution was located, and that a change of emphasis
32 J.D. Marshall, The Tyranny of the Discrete: a discussion of the problems of local history in England (1997), 55-6, 109 et seq
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occurred as a result of changes in career pathway expectations among historians since the 1960s: ‘ambitious professionals realized that one did not move up the career path by doing local history’ instead one published ones dissertation as a first book and then elaborated on it. Although many professionals lost interest in local history, the public did not. North American society is still localised, and local identities and loyalties remain strong, which must be partly a product of size, and partly a product of timing since the nation state did not exist until 1776.
33 Annette Atkins’s Creating
Minnesota is a good example of a state biography by a historian who had been teaching its history for two decades and was keen ‘to bridge the increasingly wide divide between professional historians and readers interested in history’.
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A parallel in England might be the reduced role played by professional historians in county societies, and particularly in record publication.
Danbom suggests that the professionalization of historical writing cut the practitioners off from the lay historians of localities because the subjects covered, such as gender and ethnicity, moved the discipline towards social science. He argues that professional historians need to rediscover local history and reconnect with the history-loving public to improve the quality of their work. Local history sometimes makes us rethink our assumptions and our conclusions in a substantive way.
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Danbom took this theme further in his 2009 conference paper, arguing that in north America local history is the history of the state
33 David Russo, Families and Communities (1974); Richardson, 194-5
34 Atkins, Creating Minnesota, xi
35 David B. Danbom, ‘Historical Musings: “Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are”: Professional
Historians and Local History’, South Dakota History, 33/3 (2003), 263-73
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and the city in which the local historian works. Local history allows the historian to connect with and to serve the community, to demonstrate to ordinary people that their lives and the place in which they live are important. But it can also be seen as compromising scholarly objectivity, and Danbom argued that I recent decades this has generated a lack of respect for the discipline which has in turn impacted on career opportunities. David
Russo has argued that academic historians remained interested in the study of local communities as late as the 1970s, but that this served only to perpetuate the divide between the academic and the non-academic, because their objectives were different.
36 Now, it seems, scholarly local history can only damage a career in the US, and probably also in the United Kingdom where the recent emphasis on research assessment has stressed the importance of international impact.
The impact on career path may also reflect the nature of the state.
There is little reason to think local historians lost their status in either Japan or China, and it was certainly not the case in Norway, nor in Australia. Where regional history is important both in its own right and in explaining the nature of the state, the localist continues to be welcome. The pattern is far from uniform.
Conclusion
Viewed from the perspective of a group of scholars gathered together from across the globe, there is not much doubt that local history exists everywhere, but its meaning and its practise are disparate in the extreme, and while this paper has been concerned
36 David Russo, ‘Some Impressions of the Nonacademic Local Historians and Their Writings’, in
Kammen, ed., The Pursuit of Local History,42-3
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with common themes no attempt has been made to hide the differences.
Local history was traditionally an amateur pursuit through antiquarian studies, prior to the professionalization of history with its emphasis on building up the nation state. It concerned the gentry and the clergy, with a particular role for Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland. Settlers wrote their own history. In the United
Kingdom and the United States local history became the supplier of evidence for national history, and was marginalised by the
‘professionals’, who disparaged local historians as amateurs.
As it subsequently developed, local history depended on the context of the state. A loose state alliance, as in the USA, made this relatively easy, but in stronger states such as the Communist world the subject was heavily controlled. But it was not just the state that was important: local history has all sorts of nuances depending on the relationship between indigenous peoples and settlers.
Local history retains a stronger sense of community engagement than national history, which has tended to be fought over in universities and through academic journals. James Madison asked in his paper how we can create a local past in a way which will enable us to gain an audience which reaches beyond the local? Here, the role of boundaries is significant, especially when they changed. It is too easy from an English perspective to see boundaries as fixed so that the point of discussion is the county, region or parish, whereas the existence elsewhere of shifting boundaries has altered the context in which work takes place. Then there are national anomalies. In Ireland, the continued attraction of the county and county loyalties as a focus of identity is interesting given that these reflect the country’s colonial past, but the country also has diocesan
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histories, which reflect the prevailing influence of the Roman
Catholic church.
These are cultural distinctions about the practice of local history, but are there discrete tendencies in national historiographies which makes it difficult to do comparative history at the local level? Here a lot depends on both context (such as the importance or not of religion), and also sources, but the question remains of whether we can do comparative local history? Can we find a register or language which we could all agree with. Is one theme to be examined migration within different communities and how it works, and how it impacts on local communities?
Local historians have to communicate. They cannot live with the luxury of the academy with its specialist journals and its constant methodological discussion. Local history is expressed through societies, through heritage and tourism, and through the broad medium we know as public history. The VCH has been pressing ahead with a new form of communication through its ‘England’s
Past for Everyone’ series of paperback books, and its concentration on producing good quality materials via the web and through a schools’ learning programme. Elsewhere the importance of museums, tourism and heritage outlets has been noted as outlets where the message needs to be accurate and if possible not to be hampered by pressure to offer a politically correct rather than a historically correct interpretation. Local history is about the community, and it is the community which should own it. Academic historians can be left to their specialist debates: the local historian, wherever he or she may be in the world, needs to interact with the local community.
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