ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines Thoroton’s indebtedness to Dugdale’s model of a county history and assesses the end-product that the Nottinghamshire Royalist doctor and magistrate offered to his gentry readers. It is concerned with different facets of the antiquarian ethos of English local history in the eighteenth century. The chapter aims to compare and contrast the principal patterns in the development of local history in America with those manifested in the successive stages of the growth of English local history. It highlights the decidedly puritan strain in the formative phase of the American antiquarian tradition. There has clearly been no American equivalent of the ‘Leicester School’. There have been significantly different emphases as well in what has been studied. Pragmatism has indeed usually been more conspicuous than problematics in English local history, and the foregrounded theorising about the subject by Charles Phythian-Adams is conspicuously exceptional.
