ABSTRACT
The blending of English aristocracy and American wealth in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries has proved rewarding field of research, and brings in Churchills amongst others! In many respects the most significant finding of such investigations has been to recognise that early English settlement in the Massachusetts Bay is best understood in the light of the infinite variety of English local history. Significantly Americans seem to have had much less difficulty than the English with the term ‘amateur historian’. The study of local history in England and the USA, it must be said at the outset, shares a very large number of common features. The history professionals produce a steady stream of key books in the field of local history and they have effectively captured the leading periodicals in the field of regional and local history. The earliest American local histories belong to the seventeenth century and also had a pronounced memorialising function.
