anyway.

Wow. Revisiting that 'Pendragon' thread was fun. (And great timing since the son I talked about in there turned 21 today and I'm feeling funny about it.)

"Starved for history"! I know that hunger. I grew up in museums, so I guess I always had food for it, but the hunger remains, unabated!

If you're interested in local history, try looking at Wikipedia's National Register of Historic Places listings (by county). For example, check out this PDF from 1966, when Old Deerfield Village (the whole thing!) entered that historic registry. While a lot of the PDFs for Franklin County have not yet been digitized, in places like my hometown (in Kootenai County, Idaho) many more places have already been added to the database. States also seem to sport smaller databases, and local tribes might have written histories to read. Individual buildings, towns, sacred places, even giant trails can get added to these historic registers. Unfortunately, a lot of history is based on archival research: reading journals, looking at immigration manifests, official records, sometimes ethnographic research conducted through interviews... That requires a bunch of effort, and not many historians can do that on a local level. And those that do, might not interpret the data well. The stories crafted from those snippets of history we have might not be the truth, and there are often absent voices. Finally, anyone who does local history often has a stake in the claims made by that historical study, which complicates things even further.

Really glad with the direction the battle moves have gone in. One of the things I really liked from ApocWorld 1st Ed was how rooted combat felt in the fiction. This 3rd draft feels like it gets back to that.

"Unfortunately, a lot of history is based on archival research: reading journals, looking at immigration manifests, official records, sometimes ethnographic research conducted through interviews... That requires a bunch of effort, and not many historians can do that on a local level."

Speaking as an historian, and a local historian at that, I can assure you that your local historians may be the only people who have actually read through the things you list. They also may have researched and positioned countless artifacts within the context provided by the various written records. In the two local museums in which I work, one of which is in Old Deerfield, the curators and staff and volunteers know more about the history of the local area, in breadth and depth, than pretty much anyone else around. We can also tell you how these towns connect to larger geographic areas, and how the local history here connects to local history in other places. Also, as your small local museums and historical societies generally have smaller collections and smaller governing bodies, we can be more flexible in adapting to new discoveries and new interpretations of data.

Obviously, some places will present a slant toward one viewpoint or the other, and that can get very tied up in politics and the struggle for funding, but the general goal is to discover and highlight less heard voices, not to conceal them. For example, I was recently involved in mounting an exhibit of native bead-work from the early 1800s. Part of the express purpose of the exhibit was to highlight both the work of local tribes in that time-frame (in context with the more widely known Seneca work) and to showcase the unbroken thread of local native bead-work to the present day and current artists still working in the area.

All this to say, sure, as with everything, be aware that there may be bias. I am biased in favor of local history as a way of remembering and conserving what has gone before, in the hopes that it will be of use to those that come after. Yes, I sometimes wish the people who started my museum in 1870 had used an accessioning system that planned for objects to be taken off exhibit and moved around (oh lord, the day I spent today double-checking databases!), but I am deeply glad they thought to try, even if their interpretation of the story was imperfect.?