A consolation tinged with melancholy

On out-of-the-way shores, local historians ply their craft. Their burden is giving form to little places in an era of massive forces and generalizations. Like folklorists or ethnographers, they strive to keep alive in memory ways of life and habits of mind that civilization no longer countenances. And their reward for doing so is carrying out the duty of their affection. Their passion for the meanings of small things forces them to deliberate not just on the fate of their beloved places but on all things human. Their faithfulness to home is a compass in a great and shifting sea. 

Although it forever moves between the ragged edge of contemporary change and the cutting blade of time, local history compensates its practitioners with the blessing of preserving and creating other lives, places, and times. Surely, to offer a consolation tinged with melancholy, there are less-worthy callings than giving fresh forms, however transitory they be, to the work and complex ways of human beings. 

Local history can also bless one with a passion and a mission. How can one measure the gift of being joined to a conversation one can't truly quit? How wonderful it is to be caught up with a hundred topics that need exploration and exposition!...The local historian's driving ambition is to record the manifold realities of the place one calls home.

--Joseph A. Amato, "Local History: A Way to Place and Home," Why Place Matters (2014).