For historians, place can be a powerful concept. Place is not simply a location on the surface of the earth. It is also a setting for social relations, one where people have had experiences that they associate with that location. Importantly for historians, the collection of meanings associated with a given place may change over time, the names of places concealing hidden histories of conflict, power, and change.

While dots on maps and their accompanying geometry are important for understanding place, they are only a small part of the story. Information such as who has been there and what has occurred there; who has contended for authority over it, and what texts have referred to it – these questions may be the province of gazetteers, which are resources that index place names, assemble information about places, and put places into dialogue with one another.

The goal of the proposed session is to acquaint participants with the ways that they can utilize historical gazetteers in their teaching and research. By the end of the session, participants will have:

• A better understanding of why the origins of place names, their change over time, and reflection of identity are an important lens through which to view history and geography
• The ability to navigate through the World Historical Gazetteer website and use some of its interactive features and teaching resources.

Workshop leaders will introduce the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), a digital repository of place name data that currently contains approximately 1.8 million modern place name records and 60,000 records containing temporal information. The workshop leaders will demonstrate various functions of the WHG that participants can utilize including how to use the browse and search function; how to create and upload their own dataset; how to obtain coordinates and map historical place names using their dataset; and how to link datasets or individual places into authored collections. Workshop leaders will also introduce participants to the Teaching with the WHG section of the WHG website, which contains lesson plans on using gazetteers to promote spatial thinking in the classroom.