This dissertation shows how Chinese historians carved out a niche for their academic and professional lives by writing local history in the People’s Republic of China. In the 1950s, historians experienced changes in the academic language they were expected to use, in the institutionally collectivized workplace, and in the relatively marginalized social status of their field in the all-out drive for industrialization. This dissertation argues that ordinary historians, re-identifying themselves as history workers in the seemingly inescapable Marxist academic regime, initiated research on local history in response to the changes that were overtaking them. History workers reactivated local gazetteer projects, organized field investigations in local villages, mines, factories, and communes, and wrote the local colonial past in congruence with the language of Marxist historiography. Local history provided historians with a legitimate and safe field for their intellectual pursuits using untapped materials. The lack of a political imperative of the writing of local history rather allowed considerable latitude that local historians could use. They explored the space left open by this leeway within the otherwise restrictive structure to make their professional lives meaningful, adapting to the regime’s exclusive academic language and collectivized academia. This dissertation advances scholarship on intellectuals and the persistence of authoritarianism in China by revealing that, as much as authoritarian power shaped intellectual life, local historians’ intellectual pursuits in turn unintentionally contributed to forging the authoritarian structure in China.