Research carried out by the author in North Carolina (2007) aimed to assess how museums might help rebuild identity in communities devastated by economic decline. Interviews, compared with examples from 'Time and Tide', Yarmouth, UK, suggested that working class people feel a strong need for history, intense emotional ties to the industrial landscape, and believe that museums can radically change their lives. The evidence suggested that the importance of history to people's sense of self has been underestimated, particularly in the case of the industrial poor. This paper considers reasons for this underestimation, and suggests that these groups may also have higher and more wide-ranging expectations of history than intellectuals do. It suggests these 'emotional' uses of history, rather than being inferior to academic history, may be richer, and that this 'three-dimensional' experience of history exhibited by the urban poor can enrich the two-dimensional historical experience of the researcher or museum professional.