They are found at bookstores, museum stores, even hardware stores—those local-history paperbacks with the sepia photo covers. Arcadia Publishing, based in Mount Pleasant, S.C., says it has published 5,000 of these photo-album histories, several of them by Stanford grads.
Along with big histories looking at the world from the sweeping perspective of guns, germs, steel—or even cod, there also has come a demand for intensely local histories about towns, or even neighborhoods. These books can get as specialized as Monterey Peninsula's Sporting Heritage by John W. Frost, '56, a retired tennis player who once represented the United States as a goodwill ambassador during the Cold War.
Booksellers say customers think these photographic looks back to a simpler time resonate with people. The opportunity to look back in time was part of the appeal Frost felt in writing his Monterey sports history, but there also was his personal history. “My grandfather—Lou Hare—he photographed the first rodeos,” he says. “I found out that a very good friend's maternal grandmother was one of the last of the Esalen Indians on the Monterey Peninsula. I thought he was an Italian kid.”
Deborah Wagnon, JD '82, a partner of Mason Miller LLP, an entertainment law firm in Los Angeles, is co-author of the Tennessee book Murfreesboro. Wagnon used the pictorial histories in researching her novel, The Great and Wide Sea, set in coastal Georgia. “I used Arcadia's local histories of Tybee Island and Savannah quite a lot,” explains Wagnon, who then lived in an 1850s dwelling listed in the National Register of Historic Places. “When they asked me if I wanted to write one on Murfreesboro, what was I going to say, no?”
Named for Hardy Murfree, a Revolutionary War hero, Murfreesboro is to Nashville what Palo Alto is to San Francisco, Wagnon says. Steeped in history, it was state capital for a while and the site of a major Civil War battle.
But even places that don't seem to have any there, there—like the collection of subdivisions and strip malls that make up Pleasant Hill, Calif.—still provide historic fodder, as Adam Nilsen, '03, a historian at the Oakland Museum of California, found in writing about his hometown. “People in Pleasant Hill said there is no history here. But people don't realize that history is everywhere.”
