New Directions in Local History Since Hoskins extract
Table of Contents
Introduction: local history in the twenty-first century Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord and Nigel Tringham
The practice of local history
1 Does local history have a split personality? David Dymond
2 The great awakening of English local history, 1918–1939 C.P. Lewis
Region, class and ethnic diversity
3 Twentieth-century labour histories Malcolm Chase
4 Parliamentary elections, 1950–2005, as a window on Northern English identity and regional devolution Stephen Caunce
5 Locality and diversity: minority ethnic communities in the writing of Birmingham’s local history Malcolm Dick
Making a living in town and country
6 Hythe’s butcher-graziers: their role in town and country in late medieval Kent Sheila Sweetinburgh
7 The houses of the Dronfield lead smelters and merchants, 1600–1730 David Hey
8 A community approaching crisis: Skye in the eighteenth century Edgar Miller
9 ‘By her labour’: working wives in a Victorian provincial city Jane Howells
Religious culture and belief
10 Religious cultures in conflict: a Salisbury parish during the English Reformation Claire Cross
11 The Court of High Commission and religious change in Elizabethan Yorkshire Emma Watson
12 From Philistines to Goths: Nonconformist chapel styles in Victorian England Edward Royle
13 Evangelicals in a ‘Catholic’ suburb: the founding of St Andrew’s, North Oxford, 1899–1907 Mark Smith
Sources, methods and techniques
14 The kings bench (crown side) in the long eighteenth century Ruth Paley
15 Local history in the twenty-first century: information communication technology, e-resources, grid computing, Web 2.0 and a new paradigm Paul S. Ell
Extract from New Directions in Local History since Hoskins
Taken from the Introduction
No branch of history thinks and writes about itself as much as does local history. Political history, social history, economic history, cultural history and the rest have their introspective moments, but local historians, in books and in the pages of such journals as The Local Historian, constantly engage in discussion of their subject. They debate its roots, seek to justify its existence, worry about its content and methods and wonder about its future. Tens of thousands of people throughout the country belong to local history societies, attend lectures and read books and articles on local history topics. Thousands of these take their activities a stage further by engaging in research and writing their own local history. This activity is not new, as is shown by Hoskins’ correct assumption that there would be a large readership for his handbook on how to write local history. Changes in printing technology have provided new outlets for these enthusiasts. Alongside the established journals and publication series there now exist numerous small-scale newsletters and ephemeral journals, together with short-run editions of pamphlets and books. The internet has opened up another range of opportunities for the distribution of written material and illustrations. All these forms of publication are catering for a numerous public who would not regard themselves as committed in any specialised way to local history, but have some curiosity about the places in which they live. An even larger audience read the ‘Our past’ column in local newspapers, or hear and see the various versions of local history to be found on radio and television.
Local history is found throughout the world, and attracts much public interest in very old and stable countries such as Norway, as well as in relatively new post-colonial societies. A recent international symposium on the subject showed that local history seems to thrive when the past is insecure and debatable. In countries where large numbers of migrants came from the Old World, such as Australia, there is much anguished concern for the indigenous peoples who have been displaced or downgraded by the waves of new settlers, while among the various groups of migrants there is a necessity to establish and celebrate their identity in a new setting, which has given rise to histories of the Italian communities in various parts of Australia, for example. Problems of ethnicity and belonging are encountered in acute forms in eastern and central Europe, where minorities assert their own language and culture. Hungarians in modern Romania write about places which they inhabit and value, but for which there is another history in the view of the Romanian majority. Norway did not attain its full national independence until 1905, and lost it again in 1940–45, which may help to explain the enthusiasm of its people to have their roots in their farms and landscapes researched and published. There are obvious parallels in different parts of Britain. The resurgence of historical interest in Scotland and Wales has been stimulated by a growing consciousness of nationality which bears some resemblance to the commitment to history among the various minorities and relatively newly independent countries in parts of continental Europe. In England the awareness of regional differences, most obviously in the north or in Cornwall, has not yet been a great spur to political activity, as Caunce demonstrates in his contribution to this book, which implies that regional loyalties now have a limited influence on the writing of local history.
However, the national and regional ‘questions’, and anxieties about ethnicity and ownership, are not the main reasons for the discussions and disagreements about the role of local history in Britain. One obvious cause for concern, to which Dymond refers in his essay, is the co-existence among those practising the subject of both academics employed in university history departments and those who do not earn their living from their work in the subject. The parallel activities of these two types of historian are obviously liable to lead to resentments and misunderstandings. In depicting these two strands of practitioners the present editors prefer to avoid the words ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’, as these imply a value judgement about the quality of the work done. Many of those who pursue the subject in their spare time are ‘professionals’ in their full-time employment and are capable of higher levels of thought and skill than some of those who are qualified historians. One of the contributors to this book, for example, is a retired professor of psychology, though he falls between the two camps as he has acquired a postgraduate degree in local history. Perhaps there is no need for disquiet about the division into camps, as they seem to learn from each other and have developed a degree of interdependence...
There are difficulties, however, partly because university history is becoming more specialised and is under new pressures. Hoskins’s successor today would be criticised for publishing as he did in a county journal, as the aspiration now is for articles to appear in ‘international peer-reviewed journals’. Academics are being encouraged to develop the skills needed to mechanise their research and increase their output by using online sources, as Ell urges in his contribution. Scholars used to pride themselves on writing with clarity, and even with wit and elegance, but now some branches of history use a specialised language and do not give high priority to communication with outsiders. Perhaps the folly of this lapse into obscurity has been recognised, as academics are now being urged to make the results of research available to a wider public, and to collaborate with organisations outside the academic institutions. The normal practice of university local historians in previous generations of publishing in local journals and giving lectures to local history societies has become acceptable again. Unfortunately the educational administrators who urge academics to communicate with the general public to increase the ‘impact’ of academic research imagine on the one hand a superior professional provider of knowledge and on the other a receptive audience of amateurs. They do not realise that in the local history world the potential audience is sophisticated and skilled. The local journals, for example, which are often edited by well-qualified professionals, keep one step ahead of the bureaucrats by refereeing articles systematically. County journals have for many decades had a subscription list covering libraries in all parts of the world which give them a much larger potential international readership than many ‘professional’ journals. Ironically, an important channel of communication has been lost because of the action of governments driven by a utilitarian agenda: the adult education movement which made local history and archaeology a major dimension of its work has diminished and even died in many regions.
Meanwhile the local historians working in their communities, meeting in village halls and printing their newsletters and more substantial publications have become more confident of their own ability to conduct research. They find that their sources are more readily accessible on the internet and they learn methods from magazines and television programmes as well as the historical literature. The enormous growth of family history has created an appetite for research and an acquaintance with sources and record offices. Their output of materials, glossy and well-illustrated, looks attractive, and the best work that is done is very successful not only in appealing to a local readership but also in drawing the interest of those with a more academic agenda. Yet sometimes these writings can be embarrassingly ill-informed. They often lack a long-term or comparative perspective, misunderstand sources and provide inadequate interpretations or no interpretation at all. Poor-quality local history writing has always existed, but printing costs once held back the number of substandard publications. Now they flow without inhibition thanks to desktop publishing and small print shops.
The other major reason for self-doubt among local historians, especially those who are employed in educational institutions, is their awareness of the patronising disdain with which they are regarded by other historians. For scholars wrestling with twentieth-century international relations, or philosophical debates in the eighteenth century, or the Nazi holocaust, local history looks small-scale and low key. They ask, ‘Are regional marriage patterns or town drainage schemes really important enough to justify much time or money to be spent on research?’ This is a long-standing condescension issuing from a misguided association of all local history with an unquestioning antiquarianism devoid of academic purpose. ‘Proper’ historians pioneer new methods using IT and sophisticated statistics, while those with more advanced outlooks display fashionable sensitivity to the language of texts and are aware of post-modernism. Local historians may know about these modernities, but their approach to the subject can be positivist and empirical. Local history has been slow to embrace modern concerns with gender, though we have just heard that a county record office has recently hosted a seminar on the relevance of local sources for work in ‘queer studies’.
Local historians should, of course, take note of these criticisms, but they ought not to feel excessively defensive about their subject. The researcher is often focused on a restricted geographical area, but that provides the opportunity to extend the time frame to explore long-term changes and continuities: local historians can take the long view. If they understand a single village or town very well they are able to connect political, social, economic, religious and cultural history in a way which takes full account of the physical and social environment. In other words, local history, far from being narrow and restricted, can hope to write ‘total history’. To take two contributions to this volume which make connections between different fields of inquiry: Hey shows how, in villages on the edge of the Derbyshire moorland in the seventeenth century, a particular type of entrepreneur could be linked with a distinctive form of house; while Royle links the various branches of nonconformity, mainly in the nineteenth century, to the style and structure of chapel appropriate to their needs and cultural preferences. These two examples also show how local history practises interdisciplinary methods, in these cases connecting social and religious history with the study of architecture. Indeed, much recently successful local history combines specialist fields such as landscape studies, place names, oral history, industrial archaeology and material culture. A third positive quality of local history is its aim to be accessible to a wide readership, which means that academic jargon and excessively technical language is avoided in order to maintain effective communication with a wider public through speech, websites and publications.
For all of these virtues, and the continued energy and diversification that are now evident in local history research, there can be no doubt that academics remain reluctant to label themselves as local historians. Rather like the multiple identities that have been recognised in people in the past, many of those employed in history departments who work in local history would prefer to be thought of by their peers as social, cultural or religious historians, or even to be labelled by their period as medievalists or early modernists. Yet the local historian is well placed to transcend the divide between academia and history’s recent explosion in popularity among the mass media and the wider public. This divide should exercise all historians more, and local history might take the lead as its sense of place and identity offers an exciting opportunity to encourage the public to more critical understandings of their own environments and communities.