Local history is the study of history in a geographically local context and it often concentrates on the local community. It incorporates cultural and social aspects of history. Historic plaques are one form of documentation of significant occurrences in the past and oral histories are another. Local history is often documented by local historical societies or groups that form to preserve a local historic building or other historic site. Many works of local history are compiled by amateur historians working independently or archivists employed by various organizations. An important aspect of local history is the publication and cataloguing of documents preserved in local or national records which relate to particular areas.

Geographically contexts[link]

Local history tends to be less documented than other types, with fewer books and artifacts than that of a country or continent. Many local histories are recorded as oral tales or stories and so are more vulnerable than more well known issues. Artifacts of local history are often collected in local history museums, which may be housed in a historic house or other building. Individual historic sites are inherently local, although they may have national or world history importance as well. Many however have litlle overall historical impact but add depth to the local area.

United Kingdom[link]

The British Association for Local History in the United Kingdom encourages and assists in the study of local history as an academic discipline and as a leisure activity by both individuals and groups. Most historic counties in England have record societies and archaeological and historical societies which coordinate the work of historians and other researchers concerned with that area.

Local history in the UK took a long time to be accepted as an academic discipline. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was widely regarded as an antiquarian pursuit, suitable for country parsons. The Victoria History of the Counties of England project begun in 1899 in honour of Queen Victoria with the aim of creating an encyclopaedic history of each of the historic counties of England. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. The first academic post related to local history was at Reading University which appointed a research fellow in local history in 1908. There was a department of local history (but without a professor) at Leicester University from 1947. HPR Finberg was the first Professor of English Local History. He was appointed by Leicester in 1964.^[1] Local history continues to be neglected as an academic subject within universities. Academic local historians are often found within a more general department of history or in continuing education.

Local history is rarely taught as a separate subject in British schools. In 1908, a Board of Education circular had urged that schools should pay attention "to the history of the town and district" in which they were situated.^[2] In 1952, the Ministry of Education suggested schools should use local material to illustrate national themes.^[3] Within the current National Curriculum, pupils at level 4 are expected to "show their knowledge and understanding of local, national and international history".^[4]

The Alan Ball Local History Awards were established in the 1980s to recognise outstanding contributions in local history publishing in the UK (both in print and in new media), and to encourage the publishing of such works by public libraries and local authorities.^[5]

United States[link]

In the United States of America, local history is usually concentrated on any history of the place and people from a particular village or township. Several villages and townships would comprise one county or county history. Library records are often divided by State, then county, then township/local history. The American Local History Network (ALHN) in the USA provides a focus for accessing independent genealogical and historical resources.

In the United States, 79,000 historic sites are identified as listings on its National Register of Historic Places. State and local municipalities often have additional landmark designations to cover sites of more purely local interest.

In addition, many regional and state historical societies maintain regional history and actively seek out missing historical collections.

Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union[link]

In the USSR, Russia and Russian-speaking post-Soviet states local history is known as krayevedenie and taught in primary schools. There are also local history museums known as krayevedcheskie muzei.

In Ukraine, the study of local history is known as krayeznavstvo (Ukrainian: Краєзнавство).

Artistic genre uses[link]

The Scottish novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, a dark study of criminal psychology and religious fanaticism, is essentially structured in all respects as a local history publication of the kind fashionable in Scotland in Hogg's lifetime.

See also[link]

• English local history
• Family history
• Historic preservation
• Microhistory
• One-place study

Notes[link]

1. ^ Finberg, HPR; Skipp, VHT (1967). Local History: Objective and Pursuit. David & Charles. pp. 46–70. 
2. ^ Finberg, HPR; Skipp, VHT (1967). Local History: Objective and Pursuit. David & Charles. p. 25. 
3. ^ Finberg, HPR; Skipp, VHT (1967). Local History: Objective and Pursuit. David & Charles. p. 103. 
4. ^ National Curriculum - level descriptions
5. ^ Local Studies Alan Ball Local History Awards Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, published 2011-11-02, accessed 2012-05-06

External links[link]

Look up local history in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• American Local History Network, USA.
• Local History from the National Archives, UK.
• Local History Trails from the BBC.

Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal OBE (born 1964) is a British ceramic artist, and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010). He has worked as a curator, lecturer, art critic and art historian and is a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. He has received several awards and honours for his work.

Life[link]

De Waal was born in Nottingham, England,^[1] the son of Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, later Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. His grandfather was Hendrik de Waal, a Dutch businessman who moved to England and from whom he got his distinctly Dutch family name. His grandmother Elisabeth was a member of the Ephrussi family, whose history he would chronicle in The Hare with Amber Eyes.

De Waal made his first pot at the age of five after persuading his father to take him to a ceramics evening class.^[2]. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach.^[3] . Aged 17, de Waal obtained a place at Cambridge University and deferred entry to take up a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting^[4]. During the apprenticeship he repetitively made hundreds of pots, such as casseroles and honey pots, telling BBC radio interviewer John Tusa, "It’s a bit like doing scales as well – you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing."^[2]

In 1983, de Waal took up his place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge to read English, being awarded a scholarship in 1985 and graduating in 1986 with first class honours^[5].

Following graduation de Waal followed the path he had decided upon before going up to Cambridge: to make inexpensive domestic pots with good earth colours^[2]. He moved to the Welsh borders where he built a kiln and set up a pottery making functional stoneware pots in the Leach tradition, but the enterprise was not successful^[2]. He moved to inner-city Sheffield and started to work with porcelain, describing it as “the great taboo material; it doesn't do any of the 'proper' work of a pot. In using it I was trying to find a way out." ^[4].

In 1991 he obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University ^[5] and then another year continuing his study of the language in Japan^[6]. Whilst in Japan he also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum^[7], and continued to make pots, porcelain jars with the pushed-in, gestural sides that were to epitomise his style^[7].

Work[link]

On returning to Britain in 1993, de Waal began living in London^[4] and made his distinctive ceramics, porcelain with a celadon glaze. Their shapes were essentially classical but with indentations or pinches and subtle variations in tone and texture. The pots became very fashionable, and in 1995 he had his first of many solo exhibitions^[8].

De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998^[9]. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach."^[10] "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman."^[2] He noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.

His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists, and the Bauhaus movement in particular. In visits to gothic cathedrals as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited. In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain pots with pale celadon glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Sung Dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.^[11]

In 2010 his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Farrer, Straus and Giroux in New York. In it he tells the story of his relatives, the once wealthy Ephrussi family, through the history of a collection of Japanese netsuke sculptures that are handed down through the generations. As he notes in the book, the collection ended up back in Japan through de Waal's great-uncle Ignace "Iggie" Ephrussi, who settled in Tokyo in 1947 and towards whom de Waal felt great affection. The book received critical acclaim including the Costa Book Award (Biography 2010) and Ondaatje Prize (2011).

De Waal, who has made installations for Chatsworth, Kettle's Yard, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, works and lives in West Norwood, south London. He is represented by the Alan Cristea Gallery, London and the New Art Centre, Wiltshire. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to art.^[12]

In October 2011, de Waal was asked to choose and describe music that inspires him in his work. Speaking about music he described how "you can get yourself into the loops of music... I did a huge porcelain wall - 500 porcelain vessels - and there are rhythms in that wall that completely come out of baroque music. More recently there’s installations where things are in very minimalist, black lead-lined boxes, 12 of them in a row with the same number of vessels in each but they're arranged in different ways. That’s the porcelain equivalent of Steve Reich's systems music! It’s the same notes and the same tones repeated and just slightly different each time and it only makes sense if you’ve got all of it. One of them by itself is just a black box with a few pots in it."^[13] The playlist includes Keith Jarrett, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams and Franz Schubert.

Awards and honours[link]

• 2011 Ondaatje Prize, winner, The Hare with Amber Eyes
• 2011 JQ Wingate Prize, shortlist, The Hare with Amber Eyes
• 2010 Costa Book Awards, winner (Biography), The Hare with Amber Eyes
• 2003 Silver Medal, World Ceramic Exposition, Korea
• 2000-2002 Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship
• 1998 British Council Award
• 1996 London Arts Board Individual Artists Award
• 1996 Fellow of Royal Society of Arts
• 1991-1993 Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship

References[link]

External links[link]

• Alan Cristea Gallery website
• "Edmund de Waal on Proust: The writer behind the hare" - article of April 1, 2011

Sources[link]

• Twentieth Century Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2003
• De Waal's website
• Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54. 2003
• The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance, Chatto & Windus in the UK and Farrer, Straus and Giroux in New York, 2010