Reconsidering Regional History

Warren R. Hofstra

On May 10, 1999, William R. Ferris, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, announced an NEH initiative to establish ten regional humanities centers throughout the United States. "People everywhere define themselves through the places where they live or where they grew up," Ferris stated. "This 'sense of place' shapes each of us in deep and lasting ways. . . . The regional humanities centers will serve as reservoirs for a region's cultural heritage, gathering places for shared learning and springboards for new research" (1).

Ferris's vision and the promise of major funding touched off an intense national competition for center designation among consortiums of museums, universities, state humanities councils, and other cultural organizations within each of ten proposed regions. Ferris had enjoyed great acclaim for a wide variety of regional programs as director of the Center for Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Unfortunately the national initiative met with far less success.

Whereas the Center for Southern Studies addressed a recognized region with a strong cultural identity, the NEH regions lacked coherence and cohesion. Virginia and the Virgin Islands were, illogically, grouped together. Maryland's inclusion in a separate Mid-Atlantic region limited opportunities for programming and scholarship on the natural region of the Chesapeake Bay. Appalachia meanwhile was fragmented among the Mid-Atlantic, Central, and South Atlantic regions. Many feared that humanities centers might become administrative clearing houses that would duplicate—and perhaps compete with—the work of the state humanities councils. In the end, funding problems led to the downfall of the NEH initiative.

One wonders what might have been if NEH had built the program around regions self-identified in the competition for funding. Conceivably centers could have emerged in acknowledged regions such as the Chesapeake, Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, Cape Cod, or the Willamette Valley. And the importance of these regions—and perhaps regionalism itself—to American culture would have received greater recognition and appreciation.

Historians hardly need be reminded of this importance. The foundational work of the profession lay in regionalism and regional scholarship. Six years after he helped establish the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884, Herbert Baxter Adams stated that the organization should "secure the co-operation of the state historical societies." The first Conference of Historical Societies met in conjunction with the AHA's 1904 annual meeting and remained an important feature of the organization until the 1940s (2).

Most notably, the Organization of American Historians was first incarnated as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1907, a consortium of seven historical societies throughout the Mississippi Valley. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, progenitor of the Journal of American History, emerged seven years later. Not until 1964 did a "growing national membership" and a "decided shift in contributor emphasis from regional to nationally oriented history" necessitate a change in title and scope. Meanwhile regional historical organizations such as the Southern Historical Association or the Western Historical Association and their journals continue to hold sway over the historical profession (3).

The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, predecessor of he Journal of American History, reflected the importance of region in the early scholarship of Mississippi Valley Historical Society members. (The MVHR cover is from volume XVII, no. 4, March 1931.)

Since the 1960s a number of "new" histories have redefined historical scholarship. The focus of the New Social History, for instance, has been intensely regional. Although regionalism was never as basic to cultural studies of race, gender, class, and ethnicity, which supplanted social history as the "new" history of the 1990s, the case study or microhistorical approach, so central to postmodern methodologies, has important and unrealized regional implications (4).

Additionally, a number of prominent historians have called on the profession to pay more attention to region in every aspect of historical scholarship. In 1994, John Higham, for instance, urged historians to "return to broad-gauge regional studies." He lamented that "questions about cultural contrasts between the major regions of the United States lost interest when the study of national character was jettisoned . . . . If national propensities come alive again," he concluded, "regional peculiarities will enrich and complicate them" (5).

Region moreover figures importantly in many influential books and monographs. In most cases these studies explore how national developments play out in local contexts. Regions function as settings for subjects of extra-regional significance. The social, economic, political, and material characteristics of regions, to be sure, shape and define larger movements in history, but in the final analysis topic, nation, not region, animates these studies. They are regional histories, not histories of regions.

There are a number of reasons why historians shy away from writing "broad-gauge regional studies" spanning long periods of time and covering a range of topics. Regional history strikes of antiquarianism. It can also be intimidating when a single study requires the skills of social, economic, political, and material history. In a profession subdivided along the lines of subject and period, synthesizing disparate methodologies and literatures in the examination of a single region is daunting. Region simply cuts across the grain of professional specialization. Teamwork approaches to regional studies, meanwhile, escape both the attention and the reward structure of the historical profession.

Problems of regional definition and identity confront anyone working on the history of a region. Natural features far more than political boundaries define many of America's great regions: the Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley, Shenandoah Valley—all river valleys. That these regions embrace several states immensely complicates research based in state records. Regional definitions also depend upon unsatisfying diffusionist models for explaining spatial patterns of cultural traits. Barn types, house forms, town plans, national backgrounds, staple commodities, speech patterns, and many other characteristics have been used to delineate cultural cores and peripheral regions of derivative culture. But the stubborn refusal of multiple traits to correlate in convincing regional patterns over long periods of time limits the impact and influence of this approach. Spatial distributions simply do not always add up to accepted regions (6).

A way around these confounding problems is to listen to what people themselves say about their regions. How do they answer the question: "Where do you belong?" The distinction is one anthropologists make between the emic and the etic—the insider's and the outsider's view of culture. Scholars seeking regional definitions are working from the outside in. Insiders, on the other hand, express their own, felt identity. Considering the importance historians have placed on identity and its constructions after the cultural turn of the 1990s, regional identity might be the key to bounding a region about which to write history.

Regional identity can function as an imagined community. Certain communities develop around common interests instead of common spaces: the biker community, the preservation community, the community of scholars, and so forth. Sometimes people within a highly distinctive geographic region, however, share beliefs strongly enough to constitute such a community. Mountain people are not just people who live in the mountains—neither are beach people, or New Yorkers, for that matter (7).

Whether the people of a region construct their own identity in common lifeways or scholars construct it for them by any number of criteria, region remains a construction. Ethnicity, race, gender, and class are widely acknowledged by historians as identity constructions. Human variation is so great that any number or combination of physical features fail to condition or predict individual ability. Race and racial difference therefore are products of assumption and belief, not physical disparity. Insofar as people act as they believe, however, understanding race as well as ethnicity, gender, or class helps historians trace human actions to their source springs. Just as these qualities are constructed in the mind of society, they can also be deconstructed to undo the harm they inflict upon society in the exploitation of one race, class, gender, or ethnic group by another.

Could not much the same be said of region? Where someone comes from is as powerful a force as race, ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping identity and influencing action or belief. And, the exploitation of the people of one region by those of another is as much a part of American history as the abuse of Native Americans, slaves, or industrial workers. Thus it behooves historians to add region to the list of constructions shaping the current fascination with identity.

Treating region as a construction alleviates difficulties in definition. Spatial imprecision can be relieved by the shading and ambiguities of belief and perception. Historians of race, ethnicity, gender, and class work constantly within the grey areas of identity politics. Just as no fixed and indelible characteristics define social groups, so also should essentialism not confound the historical study of regions. Perception is as important as political boundaries or the distribution of cultural traits in defining region. And insofar as regional identity is constructed from perception, it can be deconstructed into the deep culture of human behavior.

That said, regions are terra nova in American history. Historians can approach them with all the anticipation and zeal of the explorer. Like all explorers, we can ask large questions of small places. This is not the same as asking how national themes play out within regions. If regions are accepted as autonomous entities with coherent historical narratives, then periods and turning points, defining forces, unifying themes, major issues, and so forth can differ one region from another and from region to nation. New work at the ground level, thinking afresh about the structure and organization of knowledge about regions, and posing questions not from the nation down but the region up can be very creative and stimulating.

Asking large questions of small places can capitalize on opportunities to rethink historical periodization. Periodization is, after all, one of the primary scaffolds of historical knowledge. The first generation of professional historians in the late nineteenth century laid out a chronological scheme for United States history, and historians ever since have been adjusting it for the weight and balance of the new knowledge, new issues, and new imperatives provided by subsequent generations. In fact, one of the great challenges facing textbook authors during the past two decades has been to integrate the diverse findings and perspectives of social history into a traditional narrative in which the lives of ordinary people had been largely ignored.

Regional historians, however, possess opportunities to work with the raw materials of historical narrative often for the first time. Major themes can be drawn from the stock of familiar and unfamiliar stories characterizing regional life. Each region is different. A narrative of the Mississippi Delta might move from the cultures of mound-building peoples to the rise and fall of cotton cultivation, slavery, and plantation life during the eras bracketing the Civil War. The production of market-driven crops such as soybeans, rice, sugar, and cotton by huge agro-conglomerates, the consolidation of massive tracts of open land, and the consequent destruction of the rich folk life of remnant African American communities would all shape the Delta story during the twentieth century. Throughout nearly two hundred years, therefore, swings in world markets, sweeping trends in commodity production, and revolutions in labor systems would periodize this story and drive its narrative.

Composing histories of regions provides additional compensations and satisfactions. Regional histories address local audiences, and these audiences have huge, albeit antiquarian, appetites for history. Nonetheless, if shaping attitudes about the past and influencing its application in the present are goals of historical work that go beyond the matter of simply getting history right, then opportunities for historians on regional levels are considerable. Where single events such as the Civil War or a famous catastrophe can evoke intense partisanship, writing dispassionate history from multiple perspectives on a broad range of subjects can promote vigorous, healthy political cultures and stimulate useful public discourse about both past and present.

New opportunities for comparative work provide a final advantage to be gained by practicing regional history. Comparative studies of slavery or cross-cultural frontiers have yielded important insights about the causes and consequences of transnational developments. Regional comparisons within the United States can yield further fruit through better understanding the dynamics of historical change within regions and the influence regions bear upon one another. Out of the rhythms and arhythms of synchronous chronologies a new kind of national history could emerge based more fully upon what some historians have been arguing for a long time—that the United States is, in fact, a nation of regions. 

Warren R. Hofstra is the Stewart Bell Professor of History and director of the Community History Project at Shenandoah University.

Endnotes

1. "NEH Launches Initiative to Develop 10 Regional Humanities Centers throughout the Nation," Press Release, May 10, 1999, Press Release Archive, News and Publications, National Endowment for the Humanities, <http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/ 19990510.html> (accessed Aug. 12, 2004).

2. Adams as quoted in Ian Tyrrell, "Good Beginnings: The AHA and the First Conference of Historical Societies, 1904," History News 59 (Autumn 2004): 22.

3. The Journal of American History, "The History of the JAH," <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/ about.shtml>.

4. See Richard Beeman, "The New Social History and the Search for 'Community' in Colonial America," American Quarterly 29 (Fall 1977): 426; Darrett Rutman, "Assessing the Little Communities of Early America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (April 1986): 163–78; and Michael Zuckerman "The Fabrication of Identity in Early America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34 (April 1977): 183–214.

5. John Higham, "The Future of American History," Journal of American History 80 (March 1994): 1306–7.

6. Diffusionist studies of region most useful to historians include: Robert F. Ensminger, The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Henry H. Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969); Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973). Also pertinent are works by historians such as David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

7. On the concept of imagined communities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983). See also: Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds., Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and James D. Sidaway, Imagined Regional Communities: Integration and Sovereignty in the Global South (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).