Of Wholes and Parts: Local History and the American Experience

The relationships between the wholes and parts of American history are vital to our understanding of ourselves as a nation and a people. Many of the central paradoxes and ambiguities of our national existence cannot be adequately understood without exploring the interplay between localism and nationalism that runs like a lietmotiv throughout American history. The influence of the westward movement in our nation’s past, the give and take of federal-state relations, the internecine sectionalism of the nineteenth century, and the more benign regionalism of the twentieth century raise important questions about the relationship between local history and national heritage, and why they sometimes seem antithetical