Students’ rapt response to a filmed interview with a former miner now working as part of the school’s premises team convinced Fred Oxby of the power of local stories. This was not simply because they captured students’ attention, nor even because such stories enabled them to see that history was not simply something that happened elsewhere to people entirely unlike them. The more that Oxby’s department engaged with local history, the more they realised its power – both as a tool to develop disciplinary thinking (particularly in relation to interpretations) and as a means of connecting the local to the national and global, and thus of helping to decolonise their curriculum. Oxby urges colleagues to think about the local stories that need to be showcased in their curricula and illustrates – with reference to several local examples – the power of planning backwards from them...