HALESWORTH HYPERBOOK

As well as celebrating its past, a community should also look to its history for lessons about the future. Assembling a strong history which relates people to the local environment provides stability for change.

Welcome to Halesworth Hyperbook.  The purpose of this site is to encourage townsfolk to participate in a live-local history project, whereby people can make contributions to a social ecological history of the town.  The context of the project is defined by the following quotation from C.M.Trevelyan, the 'father' of social history.

"....social history does not merely provide the required link between economic and political history.... Its scope may be defined as the daily life of the inhabitants of the land in past ages: this includes the human as well as the economic relation of different classes to one another, the character of family and household life, the condition of labour and of leisure, the attitude of man to nature, the culture of each age as it arose out of these general conditions of life, and took ever-changing forms of religion, literature and music, architecture, learning and thought"

In other words, social history involves the interaction of people with the environment that supplies a community with natural resources, both local and global.

The book to which you can make contributions is entitled:

HALESWORTH: AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Contributions are being edited by Ruth Downing and Denis Bellamy, the authors of the first version.

You can access the current version as an html file or download it as an Acrobat pdf file via the 'Get Book' button.  Another pdf file has been added for download, which tells of the Sheriffe family who were private financiers of Halesworth's retail traders.

This project is an extension of an EC LIFE ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME to encourage communities to get involved with conserving their neighbourhood assets. It is part of the community/educational policy of the UK Conservation Management System Consortium (www.esdm.co.uk/CMS)

A citizen's environmental network based on the above model is being assembled as a BraveNet Site Ring.  This Ring, and instructions for submitting a website to the Ring may be accessed via the 'list' button in the following panel.

Interactive Community Histories Ring Owner: Ruth Downing  Site: Halesworth Hyperbook