What is the importance of studying regional history?

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.