Hello, and welcome to applied public history, places, people, stories. This course is all about interpreting the past and involving diverse communities in the practice of making and sharing histories. It focuses on themes of place, local history, and community heritage. It's for anyone with an interest in these areas, whether you're a student, a professional, or simply an individual interested in your own place or stories from the past. Over six modules or weeks, this course will help you develop a toolkit for exploring and communicating history, working with others, and engaging new participants in your projects. We'll also discover some fascinating stories from history or linked to those themes of people and place. I'm Catherine Clarke, course instructor and presenter. I'm a professor at the Institute of Historical Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. I'm Director of our Center for the History of People, Place and Community, which brings together academics, heritage professionals, community groups, creative practitioners, and all those interested in places and their stories. We aim to promote inclusive, imaginative approaches to making history. You will encounter several of our center projects during this course from Layers of London to the Victoria County History of England. You'll also meet my colleague Seif El Rashidi, the other main presenter on this course. Seif is Project Manager for Layers of London, an exciting, crowd-sourced digital history project. He has a wealth of experience in public history and community engagement. You will also encounter some other colleagues as occasional presenters on the course. What is public history? There are lots of different definitions and debates about this. We could think of public history as history which takes place outside the narrow field of professional academic history. It's history made by communities often collaboratively, which can help us understand our past and our world today. Public history, I like to think, it's history that makes things happen. Often, as we'll see in this course, public history involves creative or experimental methods and approaches. It's more than the traditional academic book or journal article. But this course isn't so interested in the theory of public history. Our focus is applied public history and how to do it. In each lesson of the course, we'll meet inspirational, innovative projects, showing the very best of applied public history. Through them, you will discover some fascinating stories about the past. But most importantly, you'll gain insights, tips, ideas, and skills for creating public history projects. Through this case study approach, you'll gradually build your own toolkit, useful either for your own personal research or for engaging others with your projects, or for professional practice and development. Throughout the course, we'll invite you to try activities from writing an object caption to creative mapping, to describing a monumental statue you'd like to see built. Many of the tasks are open-ended, so please just try to stick to the time suggested. There were also ideas for extension activities, if you'd like to develop your interests further. We hope all these activities will help you to experiment with new approaches, particularly creative, collaborative, and innovative methods in public history. Remember that these tasks also gives you the chance to try out activities that you may want to use or adapt in your own work, engaging others. You will notice that sometimes we refer to this course as a MOOC, the acronym for a massive open online course. Thanks to everybody who's participating in this course, bringing your own special interests and expertise. Together, through the next six weeks, we'll be building our own online community. We hope to be able to share our own experiences and insights and to learn from each other. In this first week of the course, we're starting off by thinking about places and their history before we begin to move on to thinking about how to engage and involve communities and making history. There's a lot of content in this first week, from reading the stories of historic buildings to uncovering old maps in the archive, and discovering Layers of London. But just as importantly, there are also opportunities to introduce yourself and share something about your own place and your interests. Thank you for everything you'll bring to this course, doing applied public history together.
