Local Historical Societies Research Articles

Materialities of Memory

Abstract Across the Northeast, Indigenous people and colonial New Englanders have fashioned myriad expressions of memory that attest to certain versions of conflicted pasts. On one hand, colonial remembrances of violence and upheaval are abundant and amply legible in local historical societies, historical markers, family heirlooms, and many other forms of memorialization. Yet this seeming abundance of memory arises from equally powerful kinds of forgetting: collective colonial amnesias that endeavor to erase, sideline, overwrite, or delegitimize other dimensions of exceedingly complex histories and conceptions of homelands. This essay adopts a fresh focus on Indigenous/colonial remembrances through the lens of materiality, considering the wider historiographical and theoretical implications of recentering tangible objects and landscapes as conduits connecting past, present, and future. Physical objects interact with both mainstream and marginalized narratives in vital ways, opening pathways for profoundly interdisciplinary, multimedia accountings of the nature and changing forms of “memory” in early America. The essay reassesses a wooden pegboard from an Anglo-American dwelling said to have survived an Indigenous attack during King Philip’s War (1675–78). Using decolonizing methodologies, it conveys dramatically more complex conceptions of the past—and of ongoing Indigenous presence and resilience—than stories devised and maintained by Euro-American antiquarians have typically relayed.

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

The Contribution of the Russian Imperial Scientific and Local Lore Societies to the Scientific Study of Central Asia

In this article, based on archival sources, the latest literature examines the history of creation, research, local history activities of a number of Russian imperial scientific and local history societies of the post-reform period. The novelty of this article lies in the attempt to systematically analyze the history of the creation, the results of scientific and publishing geographic, archival, archaeological, statistical societies operating in the territory of imperial Central Asia. The study of the results of research activities of local history societies has led to the conclusion that pre-revolutionary scientific societies have made a significant contribution to the scientific study of Central Asia.

Digital Reformatting and Data Rescue with RADD and the PROUD and PRAVDA Kits

Despite the short remaining time to rescue unique cultural and personal materials stored on many twentieth- and early twenty-first-century audiovisual and digital storage media, realistic rescue options are starkly limited. Building a rescue apparatus in house, especially to archival standards, requires significant expertise and expense and is often of limited continuing use. Outsourcing digital capture of these materials overwhelms the resources of even well-funded academic libraries and archives, never mind public libraries, small archives, and local historical societies. To address this problem realistically, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Information School has built and documented an in-house rescue installation called RADD (Recover Analog and Digital Data) as well as two self-contained, portable, and shippable rescue kits: PROUD (Portable Recovery of Unique Data) for digital materials and PRAVDA (Portably Reformat Audio and Video to Digital from Analog) for audio and video. All three units are actively rescuing cultural heritage materials, as well as serving training and outreach functions.

Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine

Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine

Surveying Northeastern Pennsylvania: Contextualizing the Flower-Walker Collection at the Tioga Point Museum

Local museums and historical societies often hold rare and unique cartographic resources that compliment larger map collections. A prime example of this is the Flower-Walker Collection at the Tioga Point Museum in Athens Pennsylvania. The museum holds a collection of over 800 hand-drawn, manuscript maps that depict in detail the development of Pennsylvania’s upper Susquehanna Valley from 1790 to 1940, a formative time period of land speculation and development in the United States’ history. The Flower-Walker collection is unique in that all maps in the collection come from a single family of surveyors who played a central role in documenting the settlement of the land. The Flower-Walker family’s rich tradition of surveying and commitment to preserving regional history, make this cartographic collection an exquisite case study of land speculation and development during the middle of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries of U.S. history.

ФІЗИКО-ГЕОГРАФІЧНЕ РАЙОНУВАННЯ ПРАВОБЕРЕЖНОГО ПОЛІССЯ: ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ РОЗВИТКУ СПЕЦИФІЧНИХ ВИДІВ ТУРИЗМУ

The territory of the study of the Right Bank Polissya in this article is extremely vivid and dotted, it is possible to outline the following main tasks: the territorial physical and geographical differentiation of the region in the context of the methodology of studying the food traditions of the Polischuk; assessment of the territory for the prospects of practical management of gastronomic tourism within the united territorial communities. In general, the Polesie region is not a zonal phenomenon, and its origin is connected with paleogeographic conditions of anthropogeny, therefore it is the physical and geographical edge of the zone of mixed forests of the East European country. The involvement of geographic science in the study of the history of food prints of the Polyschuk in the original landscapes of residence deserves detailed study. The nutrition of the Polischuk apparently bears the landscape-specific consumption of food in certain areas. Organically healthy food demonstrates the geological past and predicts a nutrition system at the present stage without paying attention to the pace of the urban food culture. Under certain circumstances and with the complication of natural conditions, the gastronomy of the Polischuk differed by simple gastronomic markers, but not coarse and not perfect processes for the preparation of autochthonous dishes. The consideration of the physical and geographical preconditions for the formation of gastronomic tourism resources in the region contributed to the popularization of the gastronomic industry in a certain retrospective period. In Ukraine, tourism was underdeveloped, until 1914, when tourism activities were carried out by the Russian Society of Tourists and the Polish Local History Society. The study of physical and geographical regionalization of the region at an angle of gastronomic tourism is almost unknown. At the time there is a rather interesting scientific issue for the territory of the Right-bank Polissya in the reflections of the feeding of the Polischuk. But a significant financial leverage for the development of the united territorial communities is to have gastronomic tours within the boundaries of their original habitats and the transfer of gastronomic practices to a wide tourist community

De Nederlandse revolutie in dorp en stad

Abstract The Dutch revolution in village and town. Local history-writing on the Patriot-Batavian era, 1875 to the present The Dutch revolution has been a particularly appealing subject for local historians. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, historians have produced numerous studies dealing with the Patriot era (c. 1780-87), the Batavian revolution (c. 1795-1801), or the wider revolutionary era, largely from a local perspective. In this contribution I identify key works, overarching themes, and historiographical trends. I have tried also to consider non-professional historical studies, often written in the context of local history societies and published in local history journals, that rarely attract the interest of academic scholarship. As professional historians have established in smaller-scale comparative studies, the revolution meant different things in different localities, but we lack a coherent picture of what the revolutionary map of the Netherlands looked like and why. The non-professional tradition of local history-writing can help to answer these questions.

Las Historias de Latinos en Oregón: Canby, Oregón An Oral History Project Collaboration Between A Librarian and an Archivist

In the spring of 2015, I began the oral history project Latinos en Oregon to document the stories of Oregon’s Latino/a communities. As the curator and archivist of the Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) at the Oregon State University (OSU) Special Collections and Archives Research Center, my job is to assist in preserving the histories and sharing the stories that document Oregon’s African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American communities (Oregon Multicultural Archives, 2005). There are gaps in the historical record as it pertains to people of color in Oregon, and the OMA seeks to address those gaps and empower communities to share their stories. Because oral histories are the recorded life stories of the people who lived them, they are a unique addition to the historical record. Oral histories enable interviewees to share their perspectives, thoughts, and opinions about their lives and the communities in which they live. Latinos en Oregon began in Jefferson County as a collaboration between the OMA and OSU’s Juntos Program, an after-school program that aims to prepare Latino/a high school students and their families for college. The project expanded to Yamhill County in 2016 as part of a yearlong county grant project. The grant included partnerships between the local historical society and the community-based, non-profit organization, Unidos Bridging Community. It was in the spring of 2016 that I embarked on a small, short-term oral history project in collaboration with the Canby Public Library, a collaboration that began through REFORMA Oregon. In this article, I will share the background history about the Natalia Fernandez Natalia is the Curator and Archivist of the Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) and the OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) at the Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center. Fernandez’s mission for directing the OMA and the OSQA is to work in collaboration with Oregon’s African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, and OSU’s LGBTQ+ communities to support them in preserving their histories and sharing their stories. Her scholarship relates to her work as an archivist, specifically best practices for working with communities of color. Fernandez has been published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Journal of Western Archives, The by Natalia Fernandez Curator and Archivist, Oregon Multicultural Archives & OSU Queer Archives, OSU Libraries: Special Collections and Archives Research Center natalia.fernandez@oregonstate.edu American Archivist, and Multicultural Perspectives. Fernandez holds an M.A. in Information Resources and Library Science from the University of Arizona (U of A). She graduated from the U of A Knowledge River Program, a program that focuses on communitybased librarianship and partnerships with traditionally under-served communities. 13 Latinos en Oregon project, detail the collaboration between the OMA and the Canby Public Library, and provide information about the Canby oral history interviews and the stories the interviewees shared.

The small politics of everyday life: local history society archives and the production of public histories

Thousands of small, private archives sit in attics, cupboard, church halls and computer hard drives around the country; they are the archives of local history societies. Simultaneously freed from the control of archives sector and government initiatives, and yet saturated with local peculiarities and biases, local history society archives can seem to be the very antithesis of the wider archives movement, apparently private and parochial, undemocratic and uncatalogued. Consequently, local history society archives are rarely included in ‘the politics of the archive’ discussions. But if the activity of archiving is to be understood as a political act, what are the politics and meanings of local history and their archives? In this article, I suggest that certain types of local history society archive collections can help us paint a picture of the everyday lives of working-class people in Britain in the twentieth century. They detail the small politics of people’s lives – family, work, leisure, and beliefs. They give ordinary people a name, a face, and a life lived. Moreover, the workings of local history society archives raise important questions about historical production, for these groups play a significant role in rescuing and preserving archival collections, and in creating and curating their own histories.

FROM THE HISTORY OF THE KUBAN ARCHAEOLOGY (ON THE ACTIVITIES OF THE FIRST RESEARCHERS MEOTIAN SETTLEMENTS OF THE KUBAN REGION)

The activity of the first post-revolutionary Kuban archaeologists focus on the study of monuments settlement type, was an important milestone in archaeology of the early iron age of North-West Caucasus. Begin systematic studies of ancient settlements of the Kuban region with the production of new for that time tasks in line with the new methodology. The article considers the initial stage of formation of the Kuban archaeology: 1920 – beginning of 1930-ies, highlights the most significant works of the pioneers of the Kuban archaeology (N.A. Zakharov, M.V. Pokrovsky) who discovered and first explored a now-famous archaeological monuments of the Kuban. Are little-known facts of a scientific biography of scientists. Noted that many features of the first studies of the characteristic paleoethnological school. Special attention has been paid to the study of mass archaeological material, particularly ceramics. It was in this period made the first attempts to link the settlement of the Kuban region early iron century Meotians ancient authors. The research was conducted within the framework of already existing scientific institutions (museums) and the newly formed on the basis of educational institutions, local history societies (LIETO) or local history groups. The most striking example of a local history circle, conducting active archaeological research of the archaeological monuments of the Kuban is the circle school No. 2 under the direction of M.V. Pokrovsky, which started its activities in the field of archeology N.V. Anfimov.

Sociology in South Africa: colonial, apartheid and democratic forms by Radhamany Sooryamoorthy

Reviewed by: Sociology in South Africa: colonial, apartheid and democratic forms by Radhamany Sooryamoorthy Geoff Waters (bio) Radhamany Sooryamoorthy (2016) Sociology in South Africa: colonial, apartheid and democratic forms. New York: Springer International Publishing Having long since retired from the hurly-burly of the South African sociological scene, I initially looked forward to reading this book largely from a sense of nostalgia. I hoped it would transport me into a Proustian ‘remembrance of things past’ and I was not entirely disappointed. As I read it, I found myself being reminded of such influential South African sociologists of the past as Hansi Pollak, HW (‘Harvey’) van der Merwe, Edward Batson, Nic Rhoodie, Pierre van den Berghe, Marshall Murphree, Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, Fatima Meer, SP Cilliers and Edward Webster.1 To my surprise, however, Leo Kuper is mentioned only briefly and Lawrence Schlemmer and Dunbar Moodie not at all.2 In a sober reminder, the original ideological ‘architects of apartheid’, Hendrik Verwoerd and Geoffrey Cronjé, are identified as having been the country’s first full professors of sociology in the 1930s at Stellenbosch and Pretoria universities respectively. But as I read and reflected further, I began to realise that this book is no sentimental journey ‘down memory lane’. Rather, it is a thoroughly modern quantitative deconstruction of the history of an academic discipline in one country. The book’s author, Radhamany Sooryamoorthy, is a statistician-sociologist who was originally trained in India and is now sociology professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He has published extensively in the field of scientometrics: the quantitative empirical study [End Page 170] of productivity in the sciences through the statistical analysis of computerised datasets listing scientific publications. In this book, he extends this scientometric approach to the study of the origins and development of sociology as an academic discipline in South Africa. The work deals with the period from the subject’s local genesis in the early twentieth century through to the present time. To do so necessitated that the author first undertake the daunting task of compiling as comprehensive a dataset as possible. The final lists contained details of works published on the topics of both the subject’s local history and South African society itself over the entire 100 years-plus of the study period. Once this dataset had been compiled it served as the basis for the book’s central focus, namely a clinical scientometric dissection of the discipline’s history. In the subsequent analysis, the development of South African sociology is identified as having occurred in three distinct historical phases: the ‘colonial’ (1900–1947), the ‘apartheid’ (1948–1993), and the ‘democratic’ (1994–2015). These correspond to different political dispensations obtaining in the country during the course of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. The published works specifically relating to the history of the discipline in each of these three different eras as listed in the datasets, were then subjected to content analysis. This yields details of the distinctive features of sociology in each particular period. The details of published sociological works on South African society contained in datasets for each of the corresponding eras were then further analysed scientometrically. On the basis of these analyses, the following is concluded: During the colonial period (1900–1947), sociology as an academic discipline in South Africa was slow to gather momentum. Initially, supported by the Afrikaans churches, it was linked to departments of social work at the Afrikaans-medium universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria. From the outset, its main concerns were with race relations, poverty, and crime and delinquency amongst the minority white population. The publication of The Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem in South Africa (1932) was the vital catalyst which led to the establishment of separate sociology departments at more South African white universities, including the English-language institutions. The number of sociological publications increased slowly over the course of the colonial period, with [End Page 171] over one-third of the total appearing in its last seven years up until 1947. Throughout, however, the discipline remained overwhelmingly preoccupied with social problems amongst the country’s minority white population. In the apartheid period (1948–1993...

Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger, and: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom

Reviewed by: Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger, and: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom Christopher Cumo Life on a Rocky Farm: Rural Life near New York City in the Late Nineteenth Century by Lucas C. Barger. Transcribed and with an introduction by Peter A. Rogerson. Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions, 2013, 190 pp, $19.95 Paper. Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains by David B. Danbom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2014, 144 pp, $44.95 Cloth. This essay examines two books connected by a focus on rural life in nineteenth century America. Lucas Barger's Life on a Rocky Farm originally appears to be a first-person account of rural life in eastern New York, where soils were thin and rocky, a feature this region shared with much of New England. David Danbom in Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-century Plains focuses on rural life on part of the Great Plains, a more fertile region than the lands near New York City. Danbom narrates a history of rural life whereas Barger supplies a case study of one individual. In the introduction to Life on a Rocky Farm, Peter Rogerson made his own attempt to defend the text as in essence a primary document. According to Rogerson, one learns that Barger drafted the text in 1839, the year of his death. In this text Barger recalls events from the American Revolution. The statement may be true, but memories tend to fade over time. The text did not end, however, with Barger's draft. Keen on publication from the outset, Lucas Barger gave his daughter, Flossie, the manuscript to transcribe. Also that year he wrote Flossie letters with instructions to change the text, possibly in substantive ways. Because Rogerson does not [End Page 282] provide these letters, the reader does not know how much of the text to ascribe to Flossie. To complicate matters, after Barger's death, Flossie created a number of other versions of the text. In addition, a member of the local historical society produced her own rendering of the text, including the letters to justify her edits. Which text is the real first person narrative? Rogerson selected Flossie's first typewritten account, though it is easy to envision this as a father-daughter collaboration. To be cautious, Rogerson probably should have chosen Barger's original handwritten manuscript. I will use the name Lucas Barger as the author of Life on a Rocky Farm even though there may be grounds to think that Flossie played an important role in shaping the text. To this point, even Rogerson admits that he reorganized the Lucas-Flossie text, making it a three-way collaboration. This editing may have been necessary because the text, even as it stands in this edition, lacks a formal beginning. Barger employed the method of the miniaturist, the master of the colorful anecdote and of the slice of rural life in eastern New York. At a minimum the events narrated are the product of memory not research of any kind. The memories, at least most of them, stem from Barger, but he was not a historian but a storyteller. By contrast David Danbom employs the methods of the historian. Danbom simplifies and narrows his approach wherever possible. Although Danbom admits that the western Plains extend from northern Mexico to southern Canada, he restricts his treatment to just four states: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. This may have value, but it seems striking to omit Minnesota at a minimum because of its proximity to North Dakota and the similarities in agriculture between these two states. This method of reductionism allows Danbom to examine a homogeneous environment. If one should omit Mexico and Canada because they are not part of the United States, Danbom also omits Texas, and by extension Oklahoma, so that he need not ponder the issue of slavery in the antebellum South. By his own admission, Danbom chose to focus on the whites who settled the four states enumerated above. This omission seems...

Exploring big historical data: the historian's macroscope

The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines, or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information. Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future. It represents the current state-of-the-art thinking in the field and exemplifies the way that digital work can enhance public engagement in the humanities. Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings. Readership: Researchers, graduate and undergraduate students in the field of Digital Humanities, and people looking to digitize historical archives.

It's Jun-e-ata, Not Juan-ita!

It's Jun-e-ata, <i>Not</i> Juan-ita!

&lt;em&gt;Research Notes&lt;/em&gt;: The Photographic Construction of Urban Renewal in Fargo, North Dakota

The Photographic Construction of Urban Renewal in Fargo, North Dakota Mike Christenson (bio) The federally subsidized urban renewal program had its roots in three major federal housing acts, those of 1937, 1949, and 1954. The Housing Act of 1937 defined a slum as “any area where dwellings predominate which, by reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facilities, or any combination of these factors, are detrimental to safety, health, or morals.”1 Responding to a call in President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 State of the Union address, Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949, Title I of which authorized the use of federal funds for what it termed slum clearance.2 The 1949 act defined an approach to identifying and rebuilding “blighted or deteriorated” areas of cities that differed from previous efforts in two significant ways. Prior to 1949 slum clearance was a fundamentally local effort, accomplished largely or entirely without federal funding (with the exception of a small number of New Deal programs). In addition, early programs had generally failed to gain the participation of private developers. The Housing Act of 1949 explicitly enabled cities, with federal help, to purchase already-developed areas, clear the land of existing structures, and then resell it to private developers.3 The Housing Act of 1954 introduced the term “urban renewal” and gave new impetus to the federally subsidized effort by explicitly authorizing federal funds for the acquisition of property and the removal of buildings.4 My dual interests in urban renewal and archival research date back to the 1980s and my childhood in Winona, Minnesota. I recall an impressive collection of well-preserved nineteenth-century downtown buildings juxtaposed with two square blocks of 1970s-era apartment blocks, offices, and commercial buildings. These newer buildings represented Winona’s built legacy of the federally funded urban renewal program. Even as a child, I was keenly interested in the buildings I saw around me in my hometown, and with my mother’s encouragement and cooperation, I visited the local historical society archives on several occasions to learn about the buildings that were demolished to make way for the new. What I discovered was a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, and drawings that resonated with my own growing interests in architecture, drawing, and photography. Again with my mother’s support and encouragement, I began drawing and photographing the historic buildings of downtown Winona. Although these formative experiences with buildings and archival research clearly laid the groundwork for my education as an architect and my later career as a university professor of architecture, my interest in urban renewal lay dormant for many years. It was rekindled in 2013 when my university, North Dakota State, offered a research grant designed specifically to encourage and support research into the materials in the university archives. Remembering my time as a young man researching in the Winona County Historical Society archives, hunting for materials concerning Winona’s demolished buildings, I wondered whether the North Dakota State University archives contained any material on Fargo’s urban renewal projects. To my delight, online finding aids confirmed that the archives [End Page 116] housed extensive collections of urban renewal materials, many of which derived from the personal collections of Earl Stewart, a former professor in my own department who had passed away some years before I became aware of the collection.5 I wrote a successful proposal to the grant committee that centered on the construction of a digital model of downtown Fargo and digital mapping of archival materials. The Gunlogson Award also allowed me to hire a half-time graduate research assistant.6 The project related to my broad research interests concerning architectural and urban epistemology. In general, my research considers the ways in which knowledge about the built environment is produced, manipulated, structured, disseminated, consumed, and archived, in both historical and contemporary practices.7 For this project I proposed to study the archive’s collections of images, texts, maps, and models associated with Fargo’s urban renewal program from 1955 to 1974 and, specifically, to use digital technologies to organize, cross-reference, and analyze selected materials. As a topical subject within the field...

Local history society of Chernihiv region in renaissance of the local history in Ukraine

The reasons of creation, historical and social activities in Chernihiv regional branch in the 80s – beginning of the 90-s of the XX century and the contribution of Chernihiv regional historical society in development of local history of the region are analyzed. Development of regional researches was contradictory in the conditions of crisis of the soviet system and it imposed a substantial imprint on character and orientation of regional searches

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Parallels on the Periphery: The Exploration of Aboriginal History by Local Historical Societies in New South Wales, 1960s-1970s

Aboriginal history and local history have both sat on the periphery of academic scholarship most of the twentieth century. Local historical societies have attracted academic criticism due to their perceived failure to include Aboriginal history in their publications and museums. This article explores attempts made by country town historical societies during the 1960s-1970s to learn about the local Aboriginal past. Early society-run activities such as seminars, research and excursions reveal a genuine interest in the local Aboriginal past. Most importantly, they suggest that society members did not know as much about Aboriginal history as they felt they should.This article has been peer reviewed

The wardens. Managing a late medieval hospital. Browne's Hospital, Stamford, 1495–1518. Edited by Alan Rogers (with members of the Stamford Survey Group). Pp. 368 incl. 4 figs. Bury St Edmunds: Abramis (for the Stamford and District Local History Society) (with assistance from the Lincoln Record Society), 2013. £25 (paper). 978 1 84549 599 2

The wardens. Managing a late medieval hospital. Browne's Hospital, Stamford, 1495–1518. Edited by Alan Rogers (with members of the Stamford Survey Group). Pp. 368 incl. 4 figs. Bury St Edmunds: Abramis (for the Stamford and District Local History Society) (with assistance from the Lincoln Record Society), 2013. £25 (paper). 978 1 84549 599 2