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In 2009, the Challenging History seminar series was held at Historic Royal Palaces, the Tower of London. The seminars were funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Museums Libraries and Archives Council and arose out of a number of conversations between staff at City University, the Tower of London and the MLA. Attended by museum professionals and academics from a range of contexts, the programme was conceived to explore the role, aims and outcomes of heritage and museum learning programmes in relation to difficult and controversial subjects; an ongoing concern across the sector. Although the interpretation of such heritages is not a historically new venture for museums there are increasing opportunities for and expectations of work in these areas, and a demonstrable anxiety amongst professionals about how such programmes might be conceived and enacted. In response to this anxiety, Challenging History offered opportunities for dialogue and exchange, both across the museum profession (for example, what might be learnt from Holocaust education and approaches that could inform learning programmes about slavery and the slave trade?), but with academia also, where there has been an increasingly nuanced and comprehensive debate about heritage and its innate difficulty. 1 In total, 27 individuals self-selected onto the programme, a range of museum professionals at various stages in their careers (mostly from education departments) and academics; all with their own particular understandings of the ‘challenge’of history. This number included people from the Tower of London, City University, the MLA, the Imperial …