History and Community: Who Do We Think We Are and Why Does it Matter?

The idea of ‘community’ history is closely entwined with ‘local’ or ‘parish’ history and, increasingly, with family history and genealogy and, more broadly, within the field of ‘public history’.1 As one recent study observed, the focus of community history ‘is people engaged in the practice of “doing” history in their own communities, as opposed to visiting public history and heritage sites to participate in activities curated by heritage professionals’.2They can be, as Faye Sayer observed: ‘public history projects that are run by or with a specific community or people’.3As a regular judge of the Northamptonshire Heritage Forum awards over the past decade I can also attest to the blurring of these boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘community history’, as many of the exhibitions that were entered for awards were the product of a close collaboration between heritage professionals and amateur volunteers.4 In many ways this speaks to the strength of community history within so many of our towns and villages, and, to take the example of the commemoration of the centenary of the First World War, showed how powerful history can be in reflecting the impact of global history at a local level.