What is the importance of studying regional history?

Answer 1

Local history involves two elements: Place and People. The first, "Place", means a specific bit of territory, whether a county within a state, a district within a county, a neighborhood, or one's own back yard. That geographic limit makes the detailed information sought or acquired, manageable. Without "People", we're not speaking of Local History; rather, we're discussing Local Geology or Local Geography only. Why is knowing local history important? Rather than addressing the grand scheme so often found in a textbook, it addresses the nuts and bolts of how we got to this point and, to a greater or lesser extent, how we might get to the next. The historian Thomas Carlyle said that history was the "biography of Great Men." While this may be true in some respects, Great Men would hardly achieve great things without Followers - the farmers, factory workers, and laborers who bring the dreams of those Great Men to fruition. Thus, Local History - the story of the people in a neighborhood, a ghetto, a town, and their personal links to the larger community of county, district, state and nation - becomes "history as the biography of the Common Man", and reminds us that history (and the responsibility for it) begins in one's own back yard.

Answer 2

Importance of regional History

A century ago, when Alexis Toqueville set forth his observations on American Democracy, he began his story with a description of township government. "It is man," he said, who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but the township seems to come directly from the hand of God." Before the great French observer could evaluate the American national picture, he felt constrained to examine the basic political institutions of the localities.

The French visitor's instincts were sound. Not only did American political institutions, a century ago, spring from local communities, but all of American life, its religious institutions, its economic structures, and its social mores were organized on a local basis. Throughout its History, from the days of de Toqueville to the present, the United States has been a series of regions, a congregation of communities, an infinite assortment of varied individual-and sometimes individualistic-localities.

This is true of every aspect of American life-geo-graphical, cultural, and economic. Geographically, the territory of the United States ranges from the barren hills of New England to the rain-soaked shores of California. There are blue-grass regions, rice swamps, arid deserts, black belts, Ozarks, Pine Barrens and prairies. Culturally, there is an even greater variety of regions-metropolitan regions and their hinterlands, areas of literary striving, and province of artistic activity. There are regions which the Pennsylvania Dutch have enriched with their agriculture skill, regions were the Puritan conscience has left its harsh imprint on the relations of man to man, and regions where the traditions of England's Tory aristocracy have lived on in gracious manor houses.