Acknowledgements

This is a book about teaching history, but the process of it coming into being has a history of its own. It partly arose from a panel at the 2019 International Society for Eighteenth-Century Congress in Edinburgh on ‘Innovations in Teaching the Long Eighteenth Century’, featuring Alice alongside Sally Holloway and Peter D’Sena. Matthew was in the audience, and he and Ruth wanted to run an event on teaching the eighteenth century under the aegis of the East Midlands Centre for History Teaching and Learning (EMC), which at the time was hosted by Ruth’s department at the University of Derby. They therefore joined forces with Alice to organise a workshop in June 2020: the EMC agreed to fund it, for which we are grateful. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that the conference had to move online, and we had interesting discussions about online teaching, which many of us were grappling with for the first time. Two years later we finally managed to have an in-person event at the University of Northampton, where the authors and other colleagues gathered for a workshop discussing the chapter drafts.

We would like to thank the authors for their excellent chapters and everyone who participated in the workshops for their contributions. As we were preparing the final manuscript in October 2023 we received the sad news that Arthur Burns had passed away. Arthur had always been upfront about his illness and nevertheless participated in the workshops and the writing process with his characteristic generosity, insight and good humour. He was a big part of this project, and cared very deeply about the teaching of history, so we would like to dedicate the volume to his memory.

—Ruth Larsen, Alice Marples and Matthew McCormack