Local Hisotry Value

An Annotated Bibliography

The Brisbane Southside History Network (BSHN) has the exciting opportunities of being able to train students in professionally-based community history, and to help students see ideas of social justice and inclusion, the values of equity and fairness, being practiced from the profession of local history.
This document is a guide to a folder of background papers.

Introduction

The idea of value – social justice, equity, fairness, non-discrimination through tolerance and multiculturalism – was implicit in the formation of the discipline in the middle of the twentieth century, in the United Kingdom. At Leicester University, William George Hoskins, was the first ever academic Head of a Local History Department, and Herbert Patrick Reginald Finberg was the first ever Professor of [English] Local History.
The Oxford Index states about the work of Herbert Finberg,

At Leicester [University] his department became recognized as the only centre for postgraduate studies in the subject…starting with his own paper, The Local Historian and His Theme (1952), [in Leicester University Occasional Papers] in which he suggested that local historians should be concerned with the origins, growth, and decline of communities.i

The ideas of origins, growth, and decline are charged with value from the perspective of ethical theory. Furthermore, the factors of past lifestyles and the surrounding environmental context are evident in local history work. Timothy Cooper in Making History: The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain writes,

There is a long established connection between English history and landscape history, for example. The social historian G. M. Trevelyan was a prominent supporter of the National Trust. Similarly, W. G. Hoskins’s Making of the English Landscape affected not just the development of local history, but the development of conservationist ideas in Britain, and remains a widely used text in undergraduate courses.ii

The following are works in local history which have reflected on the nature of the discipline and reveal, not only an evolution of historiographical ideas, but also the various ways value has been integrated into the labours of the local historian. The annotated bibliography is ordered chronologically to demonstrate the evolution of the discipline.

The Bibliographical List

Currently in the folder are 20 documents from the literature on local history, as well as on public and social histories which touches on the theme of local studies. They are British and American sources. There are Australian sources in the current literature on local history; however, specialists have yet to develop sufficient historiographical analysis in relation to questions of value and ideas. Politically, a conservative heritage agenda has been dominant in the Australian context.