For a good many years after the appearance of trained historians on the academic scene in the 1880’s and 1890’s—all of them sanctified with a doctoral degree and most of them openly disdainful of any upstart “amateur” who dared invade their sacred precincts—the study of local history was relegated to jobless spinsters, retired lawyers, and time - on - their hands parsons whose unimaginative works, blending irrelevant facts, lifeless anecdotes, and laudatory biographies of contemporaries willing to pay for immortality, still burden library shelves. “True” historians, who ill concealed their down-the-nose attitude toward these antiquarians, had weightier matters to consider, such as the development of stirring new techniques with which to analyze human behavior and universal “laws” to explain its complexities.

Such was the case until the 1960’s when the study of local history began a remarkable evolution, slowly at first, then with increasing momentum. The pages of state and local historical-society journals mirrored that change; their articles still focused on the local scene, but their authors were scholars of national importance, and their conclusions often were linked to broad developments that shaped American society. Local history was becoming not an end in itself but a device to illuminate national history. Why this change? And why is local history today attracting more attention among professionals and amateurs alike than it has for generations past?

One reason, I expect, is the need to question the broad generalizations that were popular among scholars in the immediate post-World War II generation. These magisterial pronouncements were inspired by the realization that the mores and ways of life bred of that cataclysm required historical expianations that traditional interpretations failed to supply. With neither the time nor the inclination to grub out answers, postwar historians contented themselves with proclamations that were based on logic rather than research. These, in turn, found their way into the textbooks and threatened to prevail, even though they had never been tested.

One example will suffice. Perhaps the most brilliant generalizer of that period, Professor Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, concluded that the Populists of the 1890’s were the logical ancestors of the hated McCarthy ites of the 1950’s, and hence harbored the same nativistic prejudices. “It was,” he wrote in his influential The Age of Reform (1955), “chiefly Populist writers who expressed the identification of the Jew with the usurer and the ‘international gold ring’ with the central theme of the American anti-Semitism of the age.” Here was a ringing pronouncement that demanded testing, and testing at the local level. Over the next years a procession of articles and books began the dissection: “Oklahoma Populism and Historical Interpretation”; “California Populism at Grass Roots: The Case of Tulare County”; “The Populist Party in Seward County, Nebraska”; a half-dozen more. All used local records to prove conclusively that the Populists were no more anti-Semitic than their fellow countrymen.

The historians who ventured into the unfamiliar realm of local history