Writing in Place: An Introduction

This special issue introduction argues for the value of place-based approaches to the past for agricultural and rural historians. It does so in three dimensions: concept, method, and narrative. Conceptually, place takes shape in tension with space, environment, and landscape. Like landscape, place allows historians to weave together nature, the built environment, and the cultural meanings people have ascribed to both over time, but in ways that privilege the lived experience of those in the past. Methodologically, place-based history engages with the historian's experience of locales, whether directly or mediated through historical sources. Finally, in narrative form, place-based history seeks to evoke place for the reader as well as to analyze it. Place-based history, the essay argues, highlights the human-scale, the inhabited and relational, and the particular and the contingent. It provides interpretive models and suggestive examples of the value of place in framing historical thinking, research, and writing.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Agricultural History

• Publication date

  2025-11-01

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1215/00021482-11923113
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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