I became, back in graduate school, a devotee of what was then called “the new social history” — the history of everyday people. The field, which was just emerging in the 1970s, democratized history and opened up new possibilities for learning about the past. I loved it.
I probably also saw social history as a way to write about my own family more broadly. My mother’s and father’s families had both lived in the high mountains of North Carolina until they moved an hour away to Kingsport, a small but prosperous industrial city in East Tennessee.
Though I grew up in what I now recognize as a historic place — near the route of Virginians’ migration to the Cumberland Gap and then up to Kentucky, the great Warrior’s Path that connected the Native peoples of the east, the place Daniel Boone “kilt a bar,” and the birthplace of country music — I was numb to it all. I lived in a subdivision that seemed to have effaced all history. It was called Colonial Heights, though Tennessee had never been a colony and the area seemed no higher than anywhere else around.
I was intrigued with our ancestral home in North Carolina, where my grandmother lived all but two years of her life, in a house built in the 1860s. My grandparents didn’t have a phone until I was 16, heated their house with a coal stove, and barely got one channel on their TV.
I could see, staying with them for weeks at a time, that history had happened to our family somewhere along the line. In a single generation, my parents went from living on a mountain farm to working in a modern factory, from butchering their own hogs to shopping at a supermarket, from navigating a dirt road to an interstate highway. But the march of presidents in our textbooks reflected none of that.
I set out to write the history of people who were called, in an unfortunate phrase from the early days of social history, “the inarticulate.” I began with the most obscured people I could think of: black and white southerners caught up in the prisons, chain gangs, hangings, shootings, and lynchings of the 19th century. I wove together local histories of three Georgia counties — one urban, one Black Belt, and one mountain — to capture a fuller range of experience. I see now that I was trying to do then what I’m still trying to do today: connect history across different scales.
Such a goal doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, I have to admit. In the midst of research for my dissertation in Georgia, I was told by one of the archivists that he and his colleagues wondered on their coffee break why I didn’t study someone who was worth studying. That question was its own answer: I wanted to show that everyone mattered.
After I finished that book, I set out on a new one that would span the South in the 50 years after Reconstruction — the so-called New South. In that project, which involved driving 12,000 miles to archives from Virginia to Texas, I tried to create the intimate feel of local history by using lots of diaries, letters, and such without actually writing the local history of any place.
Finishing that project up around 1991, I felt pulled to do local history that was actually local. Why? Because I had learned over the preceding decade that history literally takes place. Doing the work of social history had underlined the basic truth that all history happens to someone somewhere. If a historian is going to connect censuses, tax records, land plats, family Bibles, probate lists, and the like to find hidden patterns and trends — common strategies of social historians — that work by necessity has to be limited to defined localities.
But the “community studies” produced by the first social historians were falling out of fashion. Each had to confront the claim that they were not typical of whatever they were trying to explain. They also required vast amounts of research, and all that research did not guarantee an interesting outcome. By the 1980s, sweeping cultural histories were replacing community studies, bypassing local records altogether. Their preferred sources were print, film, advertisements, television, and the like — all meaningful, but disconnected from any particular place. The methods that social historians had developed — methods of record linkage and quantification — also quickly fell away. Most people who choose to be historians are not particularly enamored of math, so tables and graphs disappeared without regret.
I was quite interested in cultural history, but couldn’t abandon the idea that history is best explained in the lives of people confronting challenges in real time and real place. So I decided that I would try to explain two communities, doubling the complexity and challenge.
I chose two counties in the Great Valley — Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania — and sought to document all the people who lived in either, through the era of the Civil War and emancipation. The two counties are about 200 miles apart, separated by the Mason-Dixon Line. Their soils, climates, crops, ethnicities, and religions were the same, and yet they fell into a devastating war against one another. I wanted to portray that history through the depth and humanity of two interwoven local studies.
And so I helped lead a team to build a vast archive from a slice of time and space. Through a series of accidents and good luck, we were able to put all that material online in the earliest years of the Web, where millions of people have used it and where it still lives.
The Valley of the Shadow project was my way of trying to show that people’s lives were shaped by the place they were born. I was also interested in exploring the possibilities of merging the new field of digital history with the old field of local history. The book that emerged from this process converted all the detail into two interwoven stories, themselves interwoven into the national story.
The Valley project sent me out on a digital journey I wasn’t expecting, followed by two more journeys — into the deanship at the University of Virginia and the presidency at the University of Richmond. In the course of the latter, I became very involved in local efforts to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and emancipation, leading a collaborative project called the Future of Richmond’s Past that set out to represent all sides of the story. It culminated in April, 2015 on the anniversary of Richmond’s liberation. We staged a wonderful celebration on the Capitol grounds, complete with reenactors of the United States Colored Troops marching up the same street Black soldiers had walked in 1865. Not a Confederate flag in sight.
In the summer of 2017, my hometown of Charlottesville became an example of how local history, national history, and international history can suddenly intersect. All at once, “Charlottesville” became a moment in history as well as a place where people live. Today, that moment overwhelms, in the digital world of searches, everything else my city is.
Over the course of all this research and writing and public history, I’ve come to the inconvenient conclusion that we need to see history with bifocals — up close and as part of a pattern.
Just as all history is local, so is all history regional, national, and international. Every county is unique, but every county is part of a pattern. It’s the interplay between those two truths that make the most use of local research, archives, and passion. And it’s the interplay among those patterns that we can now see in new and exciting ways.
Local history, in some ways, has never been easier. Thanks to the spread of digital sources and searching, people and patterns can be identified much faster than through the slow and painstaking harvesting of the historical record necessary only a decade ago.
Today, we face almost an opposite challenge. How do we make meaning out of the vast amounts of information at our fingertips? How do we visualize and understand mountains of data without losing sight of the local?
The goal now has to be locating the local within larger networks, showing both that the local matters and that it is a part of patterns bigger than itself.
Much of my work in this realm the past 15 years has centered on collaborations with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. In creating a digital atlas of American history, we used GIS to marry large amounts of data to spatial thinking and historical reasoning. A map of the Forced Migration of enslaved Africans, for example, follows the involuntary movement of thousands of enslaved people across state and county lines between 1810 and 1860 into regions where the sugar and cotton industries fed the demand for more labor. The map embeds links to narratives written by former slaves, reminding us that there are stories of real people behind each of the data points.
Another map, of the Foreign-Born Population of the United States, shows the birth origins of the people in every county in every census year since 1850. It sends out arrows to the countries from which people came, revealing how each locality was embedded in global patterns of migration.
The profusion of digital resources can create the illusion of understanding the past. By breaking a complex historical record into pieces, into lines from a census or highlighted names in a newspaper article, such tools necessarily fragment the historical record. By their very nature, these tools — genealogical rather than historical, by their purpose and nature — take people out of context. They portray history as lines leading from the past to ourselves, rather than as a web of associations surrounding each individual. A DNA readout tells you nothing of the actual lives of your ancestors.
Local history, then, serves us best when it is woven into the larger patterns of history. New American History offers ways to weave those patterns, though the most essential tools are, as they have always been, empathy and imagination.