Why You Should Pay Attention to Local, Not Just National, History
The historical debates that generate the most intense interest tend to revolve around national narratives and contemporary political battles: What date marks the true founding of America? What are the real origins of the Senate filibuster? Which national figures merit public memorials? These questions certainly matter, but when we fixate on national, politicized narratives we neglect the more local stories that we may, in fact, have more responsibility to remember.
The centrifugal forces that shape our economies and cultures contribute to our tendency to neglect stories near at hand and instead focus on more distant historical narratives. Remembering the stories that took place in our own regions and towns, however, sets up a countervailing centripetal pull on our attention. The world doesn’t need another Twitter thread or Facebook post weighing in on the national controversy of the day. But your neighbors do need your eyes and heart and hands.
The Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has compared the work of building local culture to the process of building soil. Like the old leaves, nuts, and grass blades that decompose into a rich topsoil, the memories and stories we share form the soil of local culture and identity.
When neighbors swap tales about shared places and people and events, they are confirming to one another that they belong to the same story and are responsible for their roles in this story. By contrast, if our attention is drawn away from our places and turns instead to national histories and conflicts, we’ll be less likely to see the particular realities and needs of our regions and communities. This is because these conditions and needs never fit perfectly the reductive abstractions of our national history. And yet it is these local, idiosyncratic needs that we have opportunity and obligation to meet.
How might we build local memory in a time of digitally mediated nationalized histories? We can begin by looking for those settings where the stories of our places still gather: barber shops, pubs, coffee shops, churches, civic organizations, historical societies, high school bleachers, and neighborhood playgrounds. If we frequent these places with our ears tuned to local narratives, we’ll hear stories that are worth remembering and repeating.
Another, complementary, approach is to read local histories. Many regions have received careful treatment from local historians, and reading a history of a town or industry or institution fosters a more intelligent and sympathetic understanding of these landmarks whose very familiarity often leads us to overlook them. My favorite instances of this genre tend to be environmental histories that narrate how human communities have shaped, and been shaped by, the natural features of their places.
In this endeavor to attend to and learn from the histories of our places, what we most need are good guides. Where are the rememberers who hold the stories of your region? What opportunities might you have to sit and listen to them? Asking such questions redirects our attention to what is at hand, and if our attention is here, we may just find ourselves caring more about, and for, where we are.
Jeff Bilbro is the author of Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms. He is an editor at Front Porch Republic and a contributor to The Liberating Arts.
