Welsh Journals

LOCAL HISTORY IN PERSPECTIVE by DAVID B. QUINN ALL civilised societies, and all societies on their way to civilisation, have found a certain satisfaction in the con- templation of their own history. But the fascination of history has been, in the past, largely that provided by the history of the family (especially in the Celtic west), the estate, the local church, or other religious foundation, the tribe, the lordship, the parish or the county. National history is, after all, a modern invention (the state itself is not very old). Yet in the recent past schools and universities have concerned themselves almost wholly with the national and the international field. While, in our complex world, a knowledge of the broader historical movements is essential, the concentration on national history has gone too far. But we now know enough about human society to know that the larger societies are made up of a great number of smaller societies-the village, the town, the city (with its own groupings of smaller communities), the county, the region, the sub-national and national entities inside the larger political units (like Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland inside the United Kingdom). Each of these communities has its own kind of life which is worth studying for its own sake and each of these local communities has its own distinctive contribution, however small, to make to the larger groupings, and in the end, to the state. It is only gradually that these two propositions-that local communities are worth studying historically in their own right, and that there is a reciprocal influence of local on national history and vice versa- have come to be accepted by professional historians. Now, however, a number of universities have begun encouraging local history study either through their Departments of History or their extra-mural Departments, and one, the University of Leicester, has established a special department of English Local History.