The Lost Art of Local History

So while discussing my blog posts and the public history field in general with my husband, he raised a good point, and one that I thought warranted its own post.

Why do people know a lot more about national and global history than they do about their own communities and where they grew up? Why is it people can tell you what year World War II started, but they don't know when the Bradford fire was?

I had an easy answer for him: it's all based on what we're taught in school. The standard curriculum requires knowing about Ancient Greece, and the Founding Fathers, and the Battle of Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor. The curriculum is created, distributed, and required by the state, so they have to reflect history that every school district is equally familiar with. People in Toledo aren't going to know, nor care, about what happened in a tiny railroad town in 1920. So it wouldn't make sense include it in statewide standards, right?

Well, I think that's part of the problem. Why can't local history be a part of the teaching curriculum? How did we end up at this place in education where we have such a narrow (but somehow global) focus on what is important in history? I know that this is a topic that can covered in 3 or 4 blog posts probably, but was one that I wanted to at least touch on.

So, what can we do? I don't know of any small towns that don't have some sort of local history organization, or a county records office somewhere near them. In my small town of 1800 people, we have the Railroad Museum, a library historian, and the Darke County Historical Society housed in Greenville, a short 12 minutes away. Is there not some way we can utilize such resources to teach high schoolers, and even elementary age students about their local history? The closest I think I ever got in school was Ohio history in fifth grade, maybe? My sense of certainty really shows how much that stuck. I think that a push for expanding the focus of history education and loosening the static standards we're bound to will benefit future generations. Part of making history interesting is personally connecting to it, and what better way than focusing on what is literally in your backyard?