Title: Local and Community History: Some Cautionary Remarks on an Idea Whose Time Has Returned
Abstract: LOCAL AND COMMUNITY history may well be one of the fastest growing popular intellectual pursuits in the United States today. At a time when history languishes in the schools, many Americans are engaged in separate searches into their roots-writing histories of their towns, families, ethnic communities, and parish churches. Though the particular enthusiasms and interests which comprise this phenomenon are diffuse and as yet without a common voice, we may still speak with accuracy of the existence today of a popular local and community history movement, for, as this essay is to argue, there seems to be a core of attitudes, emotions, and goals common to the participants. For historians and history teachers, this popular movement suggests new opportunities to establish their discipline's primacy in the popular culture and imagination. But more importantly, history teachers may now utilize with renewed vigor and increased acceptance familiar local and community material in pursuit of the historian's highest and ultimate concerns-to bring objectivity and DAVID A. GERBER is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he teaches courses in American social history. The recipient of a Ph.D. from Princeton University, he is the author of Black Ohio and the Color Line (1977). The public adulation of Roots prompted his interest in understanding current trends in popular history and their implications for historians.
Publication Year: 1979
Publication Date: 1979-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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