ABSTRACT
Hyperlocal history is a method practiced by local “citizen historians” and historical societies and increasingly taught within the academy. It combines a defined location; digital resources and platforms, sometimes alongside traditional research and dissemination; and stories that focus on individual people and events. Two recent public humanities projects demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of this method. Alfred Benoit was a mill boy growing up in a Massachusetts tenement at the turn of the twentieth century and captured in a photograph by Lewis Hine. Jane was an enslaved woman living and working on an eighteenth century farm in Little Compton, Rhode Island. Although Alfred and Jane barely left marks on the historic record, their stories illuminate broader issues of class and race in ways that are personally meaningful to audiences and are worthy of preserving and sharing. Historians use hyperlocal history to understand the diversity and nuances of individual communities—sometimes their own. Hyperlocal history helps to identify a clear signal amid the background noise of generalization about the past.
