I thank the conference organizers of American Politics and the Memory of the Revolution (18th–21st Centuries) in Toulouse, France (November 2024), the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Charlottesville Sister Cities Commission, Florent Werguet (Head of International Relations, City of Besançon), and the anonymous reviewers.
1Preparations for the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence are beset by interpretive challenges. As historian Beverly Gage argued,
How do you throw a grand national party when the country seems unable to agree on first principles or basic facts? Should 2026 be a rah-rah festival or a sober history lesson?
2The American political right celebrates empty myths rather than engaging in honest critique, she writes, while the left lacks patriotism, as shown “by kneeling for the national anthem, dismissing the Founders as enslavers, and expressing unease at the prospect of flying an American flag” [Gage). Upcoming commemorations of the American Revolution provide an opportunity to reflect on fundamental questions of civic morality, those principles and behaviors central to supporting democratic life that seem atrophied: laws and institutions, civic participation, fundamental values and their practical expression. As Americans search for meaning in the founding era, to help manage the “identity crisis” that Gage identified, this essay explores the place of “the local” as one aspect of the deployment of historical memory in shaping national identity. By “local,” I mean a political community identity below the levels of the nation and the region – a village, town, small or moderate city, or region. Local history therefore refers to the study and interpretation of the past of such a geographically delimited community. In principle, by grounding revolutionary memory in specific towns or regions, civic commemorations that seek to bind a locale to national stories risk emphasizing the particularity of local identity at the expense of a homogeneous national one, inadvertently performing an anti-national discursive function. Because citizens experience belonging on hometown or regional levels, local history offers an opportunity to imbue abstract nations with immanence. How can scholars and public historians conjure local meaning out of narratives constructed as national revolutions? How have scholars bolstered national identity and civic strength through the history of local experiences?
3To offer preliminary answers, first I will consider the important place of local history in French and American academic history. In contrast with France, in the American academy, local history has been supplanted by transnational and global history, despite some prominent examples of research highlighting local particularities that challenge national narratives. Antiquarian and academic local histories of the Age of Revolutions fit several metanarratives, each of which has a different import. I pay particular attention to examples from Besançon and its American sister city, Charlottesville, in order to contextualize my central example: my public history community media project, the 2024 audio documentary podcast Sister Revolutions, which offers a model of participatory civic engagement in revolutionary history. The documentary introduces listeners to experts and public history practitioners in both cities to learn about the history of the revolutionary era in those cities and the active institutions preserving and writing history [Bernard, Tanguay). The project uses the two cities’ current diplomatic relationship as a starting point for historical inquiry, rather than formulating a problematic based on any eighteenth-century links between them. Local history, I suggest, continues to have an important place in the historical profession and can bridge epistemic insights with ethical import. Antiquarian and historical societies may also consider carefully the historical methods they employ and the metanarratives about local identity they employ. As commemorations of the American Revolution unfold, local histories may drive engagement with both revolutionary history and civic life.
4Historians of the local privilege locally held archival sources in conjunction with oral history and community memory. They might vaunt past local virtues, inculcate pride in provincial heritage, or call attention to perceived past injustices. However, histories that matter for civic identity do not always align with work produced by professional subfields of the historical discipline. Academics might express disdain for the proceedings of local antiquarian societies, whose papers may reproduce the structure of local archives or consider case studies of figures of parochial significance. The inverse dynamic is common, too: in America, public derision for academic history perceived as out of touch, expensive, unpatriotic, woke, or overly specialized abounds. Sometimes, academic historians do publish locally oriented monographs; the opposition between “academic history” and “local antiquarianism” is not so tidy. Still, for an academic historian to secure a professorship or professional stature with such a book, there must be significant methodological innovations or claims to broader significance. Better understanding these dynamics in the future may be help clarify directions for history writing to optimize the civic import of history.
5In America, civic, local antiquarianism is often viewed as inferior to academic history. “Professional historians are critical of the product of nonprofessional study of local history, and often justly so,” wrote one contributing historian in the preface to a 1944 manual for amateur local history research and publishing sponsored by the Social Science Research Council [Coleman ix). In the volume’s foreword, the Committee on Guide for the Study of Local History noted:
The essential problems of social science do not always manifest themselves on large national canvases, nor do the fundamental processes which direct social evolution often originate in capitols and legislative bodies or in national associations. These problems and these processes generally emerge in localities, in communities, and their nature, operation, and influence can be studied most effectively only there (Committee on Guide for the Study of Local History, “Foreword.”)
6According to this model, local history written by “adults not connected with educational institutions” can generate studies useful to academic historians who research broader processes. Such studies are also meaningful for communities seeking to better understand their own history. At the same time, in this text’s reference to the nature of communities, one sees the stirrings of what in subsequent decades would become a new social history within the academy.
- 1 I thank Charles Walton (University of Warwick) for this suggestion.
7In France, academic history has long attended to a local scale. In the early modern period, historiography was often inseparable from legal claims of rights, as scholar-administrators compiled dispersed charters into coherent narratives about local privileges in a corporate society [Soll 32). With accessible local archives, standardized archiving practices, and – crucially – no internet, the local was a valid and important narrative scale. Works of the École méthodique depended on local archives; and the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques in the nineteenth century supported local archive work and the publications of scholarly societies and academies. In the twentieth century, the Annales School often took local sites as the geographic scope of historical study. Many contributors to the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale had familial ties to regions marked by uneasy or delayed integration into modern France such as Alsace, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, and Savoy.1 The co-founders of the journal, Lucien Febvre [1878–1956) and Marc Bloch [1886–1944), exemplify this dynamic. Febvre was born in Nancy in Lorraine to a franc-comtois family and he died in 1956 in his father’s hometown, Saint-Amour, in the Jura. While teaching at a lycée in Besançon, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Philip II of Spain and Franche-Comté. He considered that French territory in the context of Habsburg history, and he continued to write about the region and maintain a country house in Saint-Amour [Febvre 1932; Barral-Baron, Joutard). At the University of Strasbourg, Febvre collaborated closely with Marc Bloch, who was born in Lyon to a Jewish Alsatian family [Huppert). Their experiences in these border territories likely shaped their innovative conceptions of the past: while Alsace-Lorraine might pass between French and German rule, the peoples of those lands perhaps had a more meaningful deep local history than the vicissitudes of political history, imposed from the capitals of nations, might suggest.
8Febvre’s successors elaborated a theoretical conception of timescales layered over a single space. Fernand Braudel, for his part, hailed from the Meuse before moving to Paris and taking inspiration from Febvre. He developed longue-durée histories, most famously of the Mediterranean. A local historian, Braudel was not; but other Annales school scholars did select more well-defined places to reconstruct the lives and mentalities of peoples past; the most famous example was the work of one of Braudel’s students, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. His Les Paysans de Languedoc considered the “immobile” history of the region through mentality, culture, economics, and – like Braudel – geography and the environment. The significance of Le Roy Ladurie’s 1975 best-selling study Montaillou. Village occitan de 1294 à 1324 lay not in any wide influence of the meager number of medieval village inhabitants, but instead in innovating a methodology for using trial records to narrate the social, economic, and mental life of a community with interdisciplinary richness. Not every microhistory is a local story. These, though, were grounded in place, in the rural countryside.
9Another strain of local writing involved employing demographic and statistical methods. Scholars could aggregate many local demographic studies to construct national analyses of, for instance, grain prices, population growth, agricultural industrialization, or the relative population of nobles of the sword versus of the robe in a particular region [Goubert 117–19). (These approaches to local history contrasted with intellectual and literary history, which tend to be less geographically rooted.) Such methods aligned with the ethical commitments of writing “history from below,” including on the part of Marxist historians who sought to recover voices of those on the margins of power in the past. If extracting significance from such studies relied on the possibility of aggregating them, then historians needed to coordinate entire schools of researchers using consistent methodologies. This is precisely what occurred under the Société de démographie historique and École pratique des hautes études, the Institut national d’études démographiques, and elsewhere [Goubert 124).
10One of Bloch’s students, Pierre Goubert, combined these methodologies into an extraordinarily successful work of local history about a city and its hinterlands: Beauvais et le Beauvaisis. Goubert drew on the methods of his teachers Marc Bloch and Ernest Labrousse, who themselves had not written local histories, as well as the back-breaking methods of social historians who tilled the fields of parish records [Harding 182). Part of Goubert’s success was in his approach. Some thought Goubert’s methods charted a new pathway for historiography, by studying the seventeenth century from the perspective not of Versailles courtiers and institutions of state but through the textured lives of ordinary people who were little affected by the vagaries of political life. In retrospect, it perhaps instead marked the zenith of older methodologies, those of social demography and economic history. Either way, a subsequent book applying the same methodology to a different region would be unlikely to have nearly the same significance to the profession.
11Yet, Goubert’s work could be criticized – foremost, for its limited geographic range. He focused on the opposite space-scale from Braudel and, it was thought, he did not even select a significant place. Second, the book’s capaciousness could be viewed as muddiness. Reviewers had difficulty isolating the book’s most significant conclusions when faced with an onslaught of details, arguments, and insights [Harding 196). Goubert was aware of these criticisms [Goubert 123–24, cited in Harding 194, fn 95). Why had he written this way?
12Such a work connected an itinerant scholar with his adoptive community. Goubert had been assigned a teaching post in Beauvais as a twentysomething during World War II. The city and hinterlands suffered a double crisis, first from bombing and then from depopulation. According to historian Robert Harding, “Goubert never quite says so, but it is difficult to dismiss the impression that Beauvais was, at least in part, an act of generosity, a gift to the living of a re-creation or resurrection of their past” [Harding 183). Goubert himself wrote, in a synthetic historiographical overview of the local history methodology: “The return to the unexploited archives of a given region and a given period was brought back into fashion by historians who were generally not born in the region studied and not therefore expressing filial piety.” [Goubert 16.) That observation applies well to himself, too. His study of Beauvais served to bolster civic memory there as the city healed from devastating loss. Its creation may be considered an epiphenomenal intellectual consequence of the French state’s bureaucratic system for allocating historical talent across the country.
13Journals and presses supported local history through the twentieth century; such local studies could be said to constitute subfields of their own: the Cahiers d’études comtoises, for example, and numerous regional university presses. Important local studies were published this way, including Maurice Gresset’s Gens de justice à Besançon [1978). In Franche-Comté, Pierre Doudier’s prizewinning monograph Villages comtois sous la Révolution et l’Empire, printed by the Presses jurasiennes in Dole, used demographic insights as contextualization for political, military, and religious “events” – which Goubert had eschewed – told from rich local and departmental archival evidence and no national archives [Doudier). This book was an exception, though, as professional academic historians began to turn to other methodologies and scales.
14The 1970s and 1980s, at least in part due to the bicentennial anniversaries of the outbreak of the American and French revolutions in 1976 and 1989 respectively, witnessed a surge in scholarly studies not only of the nation and of nationalism, but also of scholarship relying on local archives that explored how the revolutions were experienced locally. For example, in Besançon, Marita Gilli, editor of the series “Collection du Bicentenaire de la Révolution française”, convened a colloquium in November 1987 in advance of the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution to study the integration of Franche-Comté into France [Gilli, Brelot). Just as Goubert explained, these local studies could be read against each other, against broader national narratives, or assembled collectively into revisionist national narratives. They were also topics of local civic interest in the collective stock-taking of those anniversaries.
15Beginning especially in the 1980s, local history and its close cousins of microhistory and historical demography became subordinated to the new cultural history, gender history, and soon the linguistic turn, a new economic history, material culture, and, finally, the antithesis of the local: global and transnational history. This was especially the case in the 2005–2025 decades in America. Historians of the French and American Revolutions zoomed out to consider the Atlantic World as a system. Scholars have studied enslaved peoples and explorers crossing the Atlantic, as well as commodities [such as tobacco or cotton), print culture, and ideas; some historians take a comparative approach, while others trace circulation. Some French scholars have claimed that French colleagues have maintained a local history tradition while being more reluctant to develop Atlantic and global history approaches.
16Meanwhile, local history became associated with the plodding scriveners of antiquarian pedantry. It can be comparatively easy to write: the paperwork is relatively well-preserved and organized, the handwriting familiar enough. For that reason, it has attracted amateurs and students. The quality of local histories is uneven. In part, such methodological questions may also be a matter of resource allocation: only ground-breaking methodological innovations in local history could elevate a scholar to a Sorbonne chair, whereas only limited local resources are available to produce historical works. Many history departments in the United States do accord a tenure line to a regional history specialist, but local history is not typically an emphasis of graduate education at elite research universities.
17Still, historians cannot dispense with the local scale completely. Global trends are articulated in specific places – events happen somewhere. The civic importance of local history, too, has not diminished. Local histories do not merely describe; they prescribe forms of belonging, pride, and obligation. Civic commemorations, heritage movements, and local memory cultures constitute significant aspects of political culture that, through ethical and affective practices, give shape to political priorities. Understanding this reciprocity clarifies why metanarratives of local history matter: they are not neutral scholarly devices but instruments that mediate between knowledge production and civic identity. So, how do academic historians and amateur local history researchers justify the significance of local studies today? The typology that follows illustrates how these rhetorical strategies link the local to broader narratives, performing the work of civic morality through historical argumentation.
18After reading local histories of Franche-Comté and of Besançon in preparation for producing the documentary podcast Sister Revolutions, I identified a non-exhaustive typology of some common, combinatory historiographical metanarratives that academic historians and local antiquarians use to justify the significance of local history in relation to broader established narratives. For illustrative purposes, I focus on examples drawn from Franche-Comté, but these metanarratives may be generally common to local history.
19One metanarrative of local history would be the claim that local affairs mirror a broader national narrative. This narrative often appears in commemorative discourse, and it encourages identification with national narratives and ideals. One civic leader in Besançon told me that the history of Besançon is just like that of the French Revolution overall, but in micro: it had the same phases, so we should look for a local constitutional monarchy, a local implantation of the Terror, and so on. Perhaps even a local storming of the Bastille, or local reaction to it? But this metanarrative can also operate on a civilizational scale. In the 1960s, Claude Fohlen, before joining the Sorbonne to teach North American history, was a professor of the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Besançon and head of the Institut d’études comtoises et jurassiennes. He presided over a two-volume Histoire de Besançon [1964). The work consolidated a great deal of research from local and departmental archives and printed sources to elucidate a longue-durée narrative periodized, structurally, by the sequence of civilizations occupying the territory: a Roman strategic crossroads, a Lotharingian religious center, a waypoint between Milan and Paris, a politically independent territory without massive economic development. The volume attests to local civic pride and corresponded with postwar political movements in France for the valorization of culture and civic monuments. These texts are so detail-driven and structured by didactic chronology that it is hard to tease out an overall argument or method, except insofar as the structure of the work reproduces the macro-level narrative of civilizational cycles. By arguing that the history of Franche-Comté can be slotted into those cycles, the book would seem to be more meaningful for local readers than for external researchers.
20Other local historians promote civic pride by highlighting local contributions to collective national events or achievements. Consider a few examples drawn from the historiography of the comtois city of Dole. Upon his conquest of Franche-Comté, Louis XIV moved the Parlement to the city’s rival Besançon. Dole found itself supplanted as regional capital. (The city likely felt about Besançon somewhat like the way Bisontins feel about the larger neighboring city of Dijon today.) The resulting construction boom of townhouses for the magistracy helps account for Besançon’s beauty today in “la Boucle,” that well-preserved historic city center whose buildings often date from this late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century period.
- 2 I thank Wim Klooster for sharing materials relating to the Malet case with me.
21Many histories of Franche-Comté report that the first person to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789 came from Dole. Other historians point to the origins in Dole of Claude-François (de) Malet, who led a coup attempt against Napoleon in 1812 that, while failing narrowly, exposed the shocking precarity of state power.2 While these may be matters of civic pride, their origins do not necessarily change historians’ understandings of the Revolution. What would be needed is an account of how their franc-comtois background helps explain their actions or the course of events. Had the man of 1789 become radicalized by, or build on, prior fortress-storming activities in Dole? Were provincial elites more central to that day’s events than those born and raised in Paris? Was Malet acting out of resentment that, during his youth, Louis XVI had shuttered his company of musketeers? Did the lower nobility of Franche-Comté have more military experience than those of other regions? Did Franche-Comté’s importance as a military frontier since the Conquest shape their expertise, if not their republicanism? Did both men yearn, consciously or not, for the days before Louis XIV’s conquest of the region, when Dole acted as an important capital? Antiquarian histories of local interest generally tend to avoid such questions that might offer wider historiographical import.
22Even practitioners of local history are aware of its limits. Maurice Gresset’s social history seminar in Besançon resulted in the edited collection La Franche-Comté à la veille de la Révolution, published with a franc-comtois university press [Gresset 1988). An essay in this volume, Michel Paris’s study “Dole à la veille de la Révolution” illustrates how derisive historians can be towards local history. From the very first sentence, the author offers an anemic view of the significance of his own study and its subject: “À la veille de la Révolution, Dole était une ville moyenne, ce qu’elle est restée.” [Paris 79.) What’s more, the chapter ends with the author’s sheepish admission that the Revolution broke out in Paris, not in Dole. Even the authors of local history cannot resist deriding or minimizing it. Happily, the author Paris identified a greater payoff for his chapter despite the evidently greater importance of the central capital of Paris the city. The Revolution took a unique turn in Dole, he argued, because of their sense of local history and identity: “La nostalgie qu’elle cultivait pour un passé glorieux mais quelque peu idéalisé, peut être retenu pour une des conditions de la Révolution.” [Ibid.) This wistful sense of decay gave revolutionary ferment a local flavor but still did not make such a research project particularly interesting to scholars unless they already were interested either in Franche-Comté’s history or in synthesizing local studies into a more magisterial work.
23Some local history writing considers the history of integration into larger regions, a nation, or a nation-state. Febvre himself edged close to this metanarrative when he wrote in his conclusion to La Franche‑Comté:
En Comté comme ailleurs, un double travail s’est lentement accompli ; la civilisation originale d’autrefois a vu s’effacer un à un ses traits les plus apparents, tandis qu’une civilisation nouvelle, plus indifférente aux circonstances locales, revêtait peu à peu la contrée de sa livrée uniforme. (Febvre 1905, 83.)
24Febvre was aware of the particularities of the region – its long-held independence, and the tussle between French and German monarchs for control – since his doctoral thesis and first book on Philip II’s administration of Franche-Comté in the seventeenth century. The inhabitants of the region nevertheless spoke French and were culturally French, he noted [Febvre 1911, viii). Bernard Grosperrin’s 1967 treatment of nationalism, in his L’Influence française et le sentiment national français en Franche-Comté. De la conquête à la Révolution [1674‑1789), presciently recounted how Franche-Comté, resistant to Louis XIV’s conquest, became patriotic by the Age of Revolutions. Local antiquarian Lionel Estavoyer, in contrast, claimed how easily Louis XIV won the hearts of the Bisontins during the conquest by presenting that national integration as a foregone conclusion:
La cité, sous le charme, est définitivement française dans son enthousiasme pour la maison de Bourbon, avec le rassurant sentiment qu’on a retrouvé là cette bienveillante considération des princes, qui flatte, qui vous a manqué et qui vous rappelle les souvenirs du Saint-Empire. Petits bonheurs et grandes émotions. Il n’en fallait pas plus. (Estavoyer 98)
- 3 For my own contribution in this area, see: Benjamin S., Bernard, “The Sodomy Consultant of Paris: A (...)
25His approach does not engage with the contingent constructiveness of the nation – from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to the critical histories of the nation, nationalism, and nation-building that he inspired including [Anderson; Bell; Colley). My own work has illustrated the lengths to which Louis XIV and his administrators went to integrate newly conquered territories into the kingdom – for instance, in having triumphal arches as well as the Collège des Quatre-Nations erected in Paris.3 Had Besançon been as charmed as Estavoyer claims, such measures would not have been necessary. Another reason this metanarrative lacks epistemic heft is that some French-speaking regions adjacent to France are not part of the country of France today but might have been integrated. In the least convincing cases, this metanarrative makes use of civic belonging in the service of a whiggish patriotism. It may consider the nation-state as a moral good in itself.
26Local history can interest academic historians when it narrates how multiple, broad historical trends, perhaps regional or global trends, converged on a single site, or a single biography. A number of recent academic studies engaging with the history of Franche-Comté fit this metanarrative. Michael Kwass’s study of Louis Mandrin, Contraband, could be considered in part a local history of Franche-Comté. This province was the commercial frontier of the French kingdom and an essential source for salt, wood, and iron. Moreover, the story of the French Revolution cannot be understood without the gabelle, the salt tax, and to understand it one must have in view the smuggling that made up a large proportion of the salt trade, as well as the salt mining of sites including Salins-les‑Bains and Arc-et‑Senans. Besançon also has special importance for Daniel Watkins as a site of Jesuit institutional power [Watkins). For Robert Darnton, Besançon was as a particularly intense hotbed of Enlightenment reading: one of the closest French cities to the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, more copies of the Encyclopédie were sold in Besançon than in any other French city [Darnton 2018; 2009). Each of these works considers Franche-Comté in wider perspective: a permeable, global economic system; the religious Enlightenment; and print culture and reading in France overall, respectively.
27One way that local antiquarians claim civic pride through history is through highlighting broader movements, industries, inventions, or notables that got their start in their particular home town. No local history of Besançon in the Age of Revolutions fails to mention that the city was the birthplace of Victor Hugo in 1802. His natal house has been transformed into the Victor Hugo House, a museum devoted to showcasing his liberal views. While Hugo only lived in that city there the first month and a half of his life, the city is quite correct to celebrate his origins there. The city has a long history as a military garrison town, and for that reason, Hugo’s father Joseph was stationed in Franche-Comté between 1800–1802. Besançon also has a claim to incubating much important French thought from the Age of Revolutions as the birthplace of Nodier, Fourier, and Proudhon. Although it remains to be demonstrated conclusively, it is possible that factors in Besançon’s unique history – the enduring sentiment of liberty and community proper to a free imperial city within a free county, the enduring city walls, the efflorescence of the Enlightenment in a garrison town, and so on – could have tended to produce certain collectivist strains of political philosophy, as in Fourier or Proudhon, that spread elsewhere, or conditions conducive to developing talented men of letters.
28Scholars use local history as case studies in the context of wider debates. For example, Julian Swann’s study of the Besançon affair of 1757–61, in which Louis XV exiled thirty judges of the Parlement, helped to build a revised understanding of the breakdown in the relationship between crown and court in the decades before the Revolution [Swann). Michael Hattem’s The Memory of ‘76 [2024) considers local affairs when commemorations of the American Revolution have significance for national narratives – for instance, the role that the conservative chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Albemarle County, Virginia, played in preserving Monticello as a museum [Hattem 170). This metanarrative of local studies directly enriches conversations among academic historians.
29Some histories that have taken up the local scale do so when localities show themselves to be exceptional in some manner. Claims that Franche-Comté did not experience much violence during the Terror in the French Revolution, for instance, fit this metanarrative by arguing, polemically, that the larger periodization of the Revolution applies unevenly on a local scale. More often, local histories have had great significance for the field of professional history when they show how extensively certain political organizations in the past cut against normative understandings of the modern nation-state. For example, Mark Peterson argues in The City-State of Boston [2019) that colonists who settled Boston considered it to be an independent city-state closer to Venice, Geneva, or Philippi than to Jamestown. Its founders had tremendous autonomy and resisted attempts to gain control on the part of the British crown and the American state – until the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 demanded capitulation to the central state [Peterson 3). As Peterson puts it, “From Boston’s viewpoint, the narrow vote on February 3, 1788, by which Massachusetts ratified the US Constitution, turned out to be a fatal mistake.” The course of US history, in his view, “undermined the autonomy that Boston and New England had long enjoyed” [Peterson 5). This “biography of a city-state” reframes Atlantic World history and the story of American federal integration by highlighting Boston’s exceptionality. It fosters critical distance from a normative national narrative. Doing so leads to two possible ethical directions: revising that national narrative of early America, or supporting a tradition of Bostonian exceptionalism, if not independence, from the nation.
30On the French side, Pierre Serna has showed that elites in Orléans benefited economically from the Revolution, but they rejected the social programs of the Revolution [Serna). (He did so in a monograph published by a major university press, not a press specializing in local studies.) Then, might Emma Rothschild’s Infinite History [2022) be considered in part a local history? Her book considers the transnational fates of members of a single family from Angoulême – thus grounding a global narrative web around a local point. Roberto Paiva developed a synthesis of local and transnational approaches by writing a local history of borderlands, through a high-fidelity narrative of news brokers of the Pyrenées. Explaining his method, he writes, “cela suppose d’être attentif à la nature supranationale des phénomènes étudiés, mais aussi à leurs déterminations locales” by proposing a “jeu d’échelles entre une approche macroscopique… et une approche microscopique” [Paiva 2–3). These works achieve escape velocity from that heavy appellation, “of mere local significance.”
⁂
31Taken together, local historical knowledge is organized according to such metanarratives. Local history is at once a methodology, a scale of historical inquiry, and a topic of study. While local history may always have meaning for antiquarians, it is not clear that just any locale could become the subject of a local history that is equally significant for academic history. Historians may not be able to make an a priori determination about whether a major city such as Boston or Paris will always be more significant than, say, Charlottesville and Besançon. Similarly, these metanarratives have differing levels of significance for the field of history; they offer different qualifications to dominant narratives, and they contribute to historical knowledge in different ways. Still, textbooks treating the Age of Revolutions must now consider not just Paris, the Vendée, and Port-au-Prince, but also Orléans – and perhaps even Dole.
32For both academic historians and local antiquarians, these metanarratives also perform moral work. By narrating local contributions, exceptions, or convergences, they shape how communities imagine their obligations to the nation, to their locality, and to democratic ideals. In this sense, local history is not only epistemic but also ethical: it constructs civic morality by defining what it means to be a true citizen of both locality and nation. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the question of how local identities intersect with national memory offers a pathway to meaning-making tangential to the quarrels of political polarization. To illustrate these dynamics in practice, I turn to an example of my own.
33My public history podcast documentary Sister Revolutions [2024) illustrates how historians of the local can tell critical histories that engage new publics as well as meet the standards of argumentation that academic history demands. Organized into four hour-long episodes and co-produced by audio producer Sage Tanguay, the project was released as Season 3 of the podcast channel Symposia, produced by the University of Virginia’s Brown Residential College through the Virginia Audio Collective and WTJU 91.1 FM [Bernard, Tanguay). The title of the project is inspired by a long history of comparison between the American and French revolutions, including Susan Dunn’s book by that name [Dunn). But it refers also to the contemporary “sister cities” relationship between Charlottesville and Besançon, a pairing which dates from a civic agreement between the two towns in 2006. The project takes this diplomatic friendship as a point of departure, instead of beginning with any historical links they may have had in the Age of Revolutions. If I wanted Virginians to invest in researching and teaching eighteenth-century French history at the flagship public university, I sought to make a strong epistemic and civic case for how that history could matter to residents of Albemarle County today. Like Goubert in Beauvais, I was appointed to a position in a new city, Charlottesville, that I wanted to better understand. Given that Charlottesville and Besançon are paired diplomatically today, what could I learn by comparing these two cities’ histories?
34One comparison emerged immediately: that of parallel ambassadors. The French ambassador to America in 1788, François-Élie de Moustier, was from Franche-Comté, while the American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, lived in Albemarle County. While Jefferson never traveled to Besançon – he went as far east as Dijon before turning south towards Rome – their respective political roles are instructive. Why were these two diplomats who contributed to early Franco-American diplomatic relations produced by those two communities? This question launches the documentary podcast’s central problematic: what that comparison can help us to see about the trajectory of the two communities in the Age of Revolutions.
35We concluded by the end of the documentary that the status of these two statesmen attested to the prominence of these two communities – one military, one agrarian. Franche-Comté did have unique experiences with revolution because of their military garrison – and their very name indicated a deep memory of the province’s self-determination. Local cahiers de doléances requested restoring ancient privileges such as exemption from the gabelle befitting a free country. It was also a center of Fédéraliste resistance in France to Jacobin state centralization (like what Americans call “anti-federalism”). As for Jefferson, he epitomizes the vast power of Virginia, which dominated the early American economic and political system and produced several presidents. Charlottesville also can be taken to represent a Jeffersonian model of agrarian citizenship; the country went in a very different direction with urbanization and industrialization. Charlottesville’s prominence seemed greater in 1820 than in 2020; for such places, the Revolution was followed by industrialization and the growth of mega-cities. Second, too, Charlottesville’s history of racial enslavement and the plantation economy helps account for the kinds of resources Jefferson was able to accrue to enable his polymathic career as a statesman, gentleman, and scholar.
36The logistical process of documentary production began by recording interviews with local experts. Co-producer Sage Tanguay and I traveled to Besançon in summer 2023, with financial support from the Charlottesville Sister Cities Commission (the City Council-appointed branch of Sister Cities International), the AMERICA2026 committee (america2026.eu; a scholarly organization aiming to reassess the American Revolution’s place in world history on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence), and the University of Virginia’s Department of French and Brown Residential College. We spent a full week in production in Besançon conducting research, touring historic sites, and interviewing public historians, curators, art historians, and representatives of the city including representatives of the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (direction régionale des affaires culturelles, or DRAC) and the cathedral; the musée des Beaux-arts et d’Archéologie, the musée du Temps at the palais Granvelle; the Vauban Citadel; the Saline Royal at Arc-et-Senans; the University Burgundy Franche-Comté; the local antiquarian/scholarly society, the Société d’émulation du Doubs. I also returned to Franche-Comté in January 2023 to interview the Moustier family at their château de Bournel. Back in Charlottesville, our team shifted to post-production. Undergraduate assistants organized and cleaned the audio files, while a graduate student in French transcribed and translated interviews conducted in Besançon. English voice actors then recorded these translations, which were layered into the episodes by a producer – by far the most technically complex part of editing. Finally, for the last episode, my co-producer and I taught an interdisciplinary honors class using project-based pedagogy in which students designed and produced the episode themselves. Students researched local revolutionary history, identified interview subjects, and contributed to scripting and editing, transforming the classroom into a site of public-facing historical work. This method placed demands on the time and expertise of the local community of historians, but it also allowed our students to channel their learning into a final deliverable as well as a public presentation.
37In total, the project drew on 20 interviews with approximately 28 hours of recorded material condensed into four hour-long episodes. Each episode is structured intellectually like an hourlong undergraduate lecture or book chapter, with a central argument hanging on evidence gleaned from interviews and recorded narration.
38We launched the project with our college seminar students from Brown Residential College at the University of Virginia in April 2024 in the presence of a visiting diplomatic delegation from Besançon including the deputy mayor for international relations and the head of international relations for city hall; I then presented the project publicly at Besançon’s city hall in November 2024.
39The genre of this project can be understood as a “community media audio documentary podcast”. The concept draws on the principles of community media, a participatory form of content production that amplifies the perspectives of a group – often marginalized – rather than privileging credentialed expertise as the sole source of authority. Instead of featuring a single author or curator, we structured the series as thematic, documentary-style episodes that interweave multiple interviews with narration. Applying this approach to academic historians, curators, and other stakeholders in Besançon and Charlottesville allowed us to present them not only as experts but as members of engaged communities with personal stakes in the past. This framing, we hoped, would generate new forms of meaning for public audiences.
40This format posed some challenges. Historians are not always accustomed to participatory, collaborative methods, and editorial decisions inevitably imposed our own narrative on the material. Nevertheless, participants embraced the opportunity to reflect on their cities within a collaborative, transatlantic civic project. The resulting episodes introduce listeners not only to historical narratives but also to the memory cultures of both cities – how the revolutions are commemorated institutionally – while evoking the sensory experience of place through an audio travelogue. The first three episodes explore Besançon’s history, from the conquest of Franche-Comté to the Enlightenment and the Revolution.
41The project introduces listeners not only to a narrative of “what happened,” but also to the memory cultures that shape how these revolutions are remembered institutionally in each city. By conjuring the sonic world of an audio travelogue, the series transforms historical interpretation into an embodied experience. Hearing the ambient sounds of Besançon’s cathedral or the echo of an art museum gallery invites listeners to imagine themselves within these spaces, fostering a sense of proximity and belonging. This sensory engagement is not merely aesthetic; it functions methodologically to bridge the gap between abstract historical processes and the lived environments of local communities, cultivating civic feeling rooted in place. It blends elements of history and travelogue. In this sense, the podcast is not simply a vehicle for storytelling but a methodological experiment in public history and local history, one that foregrounds memory culture, the personal voices of historians, and wide community participation.
42Overall, the Sister Revolutions podcast project offers a model of civically engaged local history that attends to the variety of local history metanarratives. Writing critical history through community media can bring a wide range of stakeholders together, from scholars, students, and academic administrators to general community members, including families with connections to that time and place. The immanence that local history affords has potential for fostering civic engagement around history and democratic values within local communities. Through the Sister Revolutions project, we brought the AMERICA2026 project of commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution to a local scale in these two communities. American audiences now can hear the voices of Besançon scholars dubbed into English. And we positioned eighteenth-century history at the center of the current diplomatic relationship between these two cities paired through the Sister Cities International program. Future research should consider more fully the distinctions between academic history and local antiquarianism; the differences between French and American traditions of civic participation, patriotism, and local history; and the rich complexities of historiography. Still, local history – often dismissed as parochial – plays a crucial epistemic and ethical role in shaping civic identity and democratic engagement, and projects like Sister Revolutions show how participatory, place-based narratives can bridge scholarly rigor with public meaning-making amid polarized national commemorations.
43Historically, sister city pairings proliferated not just to spur economic development or tourism. The system provided an institutional structure in which to repair international relationships on a local scale after World War II between “recently warring camps” who now “set about the work of… reconciliation,” first in Germany and France and then expanding to cities in other countries [Zelinsky 6). Today, if those who control American diplomacy and national cultural institutions turn inward into isolationism, wrench funding from humanistic study, and silence critical history, then it is on the local level, between communities of like-minded, engaged publics, that cosmopolitan exchange, free thought, and solidarity can occur.