This introduction offers a simple definition of local history. Instead of the standard definition identifying a particular community and then following a particular course to determine its past, the author sees local history as “the study of past events, or of people or of groups, in a given geographical area-a study based on a wide variety of documentary evidence and placed in a comparative context that should be both regional and national.” This definition then leads to other subjects, such as the proper research method; the kind of relations with regional, national and even global history; and the relations with “professional historians”, among others. She also discusses the vision of local historians as amateur historians, which she criticizes.
