  It is an obvious statement that all the galaxies we see today in and around
our Local Group have been forming and evolving for a significant fraction of
the age of the Universe. It is not a great leap of logic to further state that
the manner in which they have formed and evolved must be fairly representative
of these processes in general. Unless of course we would like to assume that
our local region of space is in some way peculiar for which there is no
evidence. In other words, if we are able to determine accurate star formation
histories for the nearby galaxies back to the ages of the oldest globular
clusters then we will also obtain a representative picture of how galaxies have
evolved from the earliest times, and predict what nearby galaxies looked like
at intermediate and high redshifts.
  Deep, precision, multi-colour photometry of resolved stellar populations in
external galaxies can uniquely determine the star formation histories of nearby
galaxies going back many Gyrs. Hubble Space Telescope and high quality ground
based imaging have recently resulted in dramatic Colour-Magnitude Diagrams of
the faint old resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies. Although data
deep enough to unambiguously trace back to the very oldest populations does not
yet exist (except for a few small dSphs in the Galaxy Halo), these preliminary
studies make the potential for deeper data for a range of galaxy types look
very exciting. For example, recent results on the very low metallicity dwarf
irregular galaxy Leo A suggests we have found a predominantly, if not entirely,
young galaxy, less than 2 Gyr old, in the Local Group. Nearby faint star
Colour-Magnitude Diagrams thus provide an important and independent method to
confirm the high redshift galaxy survey predictions of galactic evolution.
