It is arguable that what has most bedevilled the recent academic practice of history in Britain has been the triumph over integrative history - or that mode of history which seeks to reconstitute and to explain the multi-dimensional nature of past experience - of what might be called the disintegrative historical approach, that is, specialised thematic history. The former mode includes local history, national history (by which here is meant much more than the political or constitutional history of the Nation State), international history - even histories of ‘civilisations’ or of the world - and takes ‘society’ as the central organising principle over time. The latter mode comprises, for example, political history, demographic history, economic history and so on through to such exotic sub-species of the so-called new social history as the histories of class, gender, sex, crime or leisure. Put crudely, if this second type of historical approach concerns itself with particular categories of persons or activities, with pre-selected processes and with highly specific tendencies in the relatively short term, then the first has to do with the fluctuating development of recognisable social entities in the round, and with their changing interrelationships usually over longer time scales. Instructive and fascinating as is undoubtedly the detailed thematic approach, and vital as it continues to be as the indispensable technical preliminary to the accurate reconstruction of the past in a multi-dimensional sense, it is hardly deniable that - as the Victorians recognised - it is the broader interdisciplinary approach which should represent the ultimate aspiration of the historical practitioner, simply because it is that which is most culturally relevant to the education of the citizen. It is equally clear, however, that few professional historians today are seeking either to construct their undergraduate syllabuses on such lines or to write connectedly for a wider public about such matters over periods much longer than a century or two.

In the study of folktales, both in Britain and internationally, the privileged genre has always been the fairytale, the märchen or ‘Wonder Tale’. These complex, picturesque stories, such as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, have attracted innumerable scholarly collectors and interpreters. There is, however, another kind of oral folk narrative, equally widespread but less glamorous, which has far more to offer to the student of popular rural culture. I refer to the kind of story technically known to English-speaking folklorists as a ‘legend’ (German Sage). This centres upon some specific place, person or object which really exists or has existed within the knowledge of those telling and hearing the story. It reflects the beliefs, moral judgements and everyday preoccupations of the social group, and is in many cases, though not invariably, told ‘as true’. Its aim is to hand on accounts of significant events alleged to have occurred in a particular community or area and it has no truck with ‘once.upon a time’ and the ‘never-never land’. While the fairytale is long and is told for its entertainment value, the legend is almost always brief, for its normal context is casual conversation, where it is recounted in order to inform, explain, warn or educate. Its style is sober and realistic, for though it may contain supernatural and fantastic elements, these are given maximum plausibility by being brought into close association with the physical localisation of the tale.

Chartism, the first genuinely working-class mass political movement, has attracted numerous general, regional, and local histories. The overwhelming proportion of these works concentrate on Chartism's strongholds in London, provincial urban centres, and the theatres of industrialism — including those in Scotland and Wales. Yet despite these regional characteristics, the common assumption is that Chartism was a national movement. This assumption is implicit in works including J.T. Ward's Chartism, while Dorothy Thompson, the author of the most recent notionally national overview, suggests that countryside Chartism has been underestimated.

Since the early 1960s the ‘language question’ in Wales has excited deep and often fractious debate. It is to the pace and pattern of change in the Welsh-speaking population of Wales, and the efforts that have been made to halt the long-standing spiral of linguistic decline that this study addresses itself. Of particular interest is the situation prevailing in rural areas of the north and west of the Principality. These areas have long been regarded as the traditional bastions of the language, and it is here that the forces of anglicisation are currently having such a profound effect on indigenous communities. Together, these communities occupy and define a heartland — a linguistic domain — that is frequently referred to as Y Fro Gymraeg (literally the Welsh-speaking Region). No firm boundaries can be specified, but this core is normally thought to include areas where more than seventy per cent, or even eighty per cent, of the resident population aged three years and over is able to speak Welsh. Beyond this boundary lies Cymru di-Gymraeg (literally non Welsh-speaking Wales); for some, the land from which the language has been disinherited.

The village is an important research theme in Romania in view of its significance for culture and ecology as well as the modernisation process. Interest developed after Romanian Independence but the efforts of the early historians like A.D. Xenopol (1847–1920) were greatly extended after the First World War, when the enlargement of frontiers, adding Transylvania (and temporarily Bessarabia) to the Old Kingdom embracing Moldavia and Wallachia, gave Romanian scholars access to the whole of the central Carpathian belt. Historians like C. Daicoviciu (1898–1973) and C.C. Giurescu (1901–77) were joined by ethnographers and sociologists, such as D. Gusti (1880–1955) and R. Vuia (1887–1963), ecologists like I. Simionescu (1873–1944) and geographers including I. Conea (1902–74) and V. Mihailescu (1890–1978).1 Interdisciplinary research stimulated by royal patronage was particularly fruitful in the case of the project involving a selection of some sixty representative Romanian villages (‘60 sate romanesti’).2 This gave rise to numerous publications, including monographs and shorter pieces, which formed the core of a distinguished sociology journal of the 1930s: Sociologie Romaneasca.