| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. By Melvin Patrick Ely. (New York: Knopf, 2004. x, 640 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-679-44738-5.)
At my oral qualifying examination, I fielded a question about the direction of southern history by predicting boldly that local histories would predominate in the next decade or so. As with so many such claims for the future proffered, however confidently, by those trained to study the past, I was wrong. Dead wrong. If anything, the soured job market of the late 1990s and the narrowed avenue to gaining recognition in the publishing business have convinced historians that they must think bigger rather than smaller so as to avoid the stigma of being limited.	1
Of course, those who have hefted the yoke of smallness know well that such logic is sorely flawed. To accomplish a local study requires the historian to sift through the mounds of minutiae in these often sleepy, seemingly inconsequential locales, first to master the characteristics of the particular community's life and then to measure it against the broader story, regional or national. Thus the task of the local tale well told forces the historian to defy easy categorization by assuming responsibility for all of the profession's subspecialties, becoming social, cultural, economic, political, material, and gender historian as well as biographer and genealogist, all at once, a griot, as it were, in order to understand the subject of her or his inquiry. And the historian has then to convince those skeptical historians who dismiss local history as parochial that this is a story of consequence. So much for being limited.	. . .

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