The Crusades is an area of rapidly expanding interest. Students increasingly see an understanding of the roots of religious violence and of interaction between Christian and Islamic cultures as a critical tool for citizenship in the modern world.  Meer

In the English-speaking world at least, there has been something of a deficit of explicit methodological reflection on history. However, there now exists a widespread sense that this must change.  Meer

The philosopher W.B. Gallie argued many years ago that there could be no simple definition of words such as 'freedom' because they embodied what he called 'essentially contested concepts'.  Meer

Stimulated anew in the 1990s by the slaughter and the so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia, and by the horrors of Rwanda, research about and around genocide flourishes as never before.  Meer

Recent decades have seen a remarkable growth of interest in intellectual history. Intellectual history has become a popular branch of historical studies at the same time as it has a growing audience among students reading politics, philosophy, international relations, English, and other academic areas across the arts and social sciences.  Meer

Science is one of the main features of the contemporary world, and shapes our lives to an extent that has no precedents in history. Yet science as we know it today is the outcome of contingent social processes, and its global success is far from self-explanatory.  Meer

Serious research in and around the history—and contemporary reality—of slavery is very wide-ranging, and flourishes as never before. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed series, Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, meets the need for a reference work to help users make sense of the subject’s vast and dispersed literature, and the continuing explosion in research output.  Meer

Since the end of the 1980s the field of Holocaust studies has burgeoned, diversified, and experienced a series of important controversies. Drawing on the best research of the past sixty years, this collection brings together the most significant secondary literature on the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews.  Meer

The Celtic World, a new title in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Historical Studies series, brings together canonical and the best cutting-edge scholarship in Celtic Studies, including key journal articles, many of which have been translated into English specifically for this set.  Meer

The question of gender in science and technology is pursued by scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: historians study the lives of women scientists within the context of institutions that for centuries held women at arm’s length; sociologists uncover women’s access to the means of scientific production; biologists scrutinize how science has studied female and male bodies; cultural critics explore normative understandings of femininity and masculinity; philosophers and historians of science analyse how gender has influenced the content and methods of science and technology.  Meer

This collection reflects both the classic building blocks of Reformation history, such as the writings of Luther and Calvin, and also the new historiography which has emerged in recent years.  Meer

Magic and witchcraft have been important components of almost every human culture throughout history, and continue to be so in the present day, both globally and in the West.  Meer

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urbanization is one of the defining features of the contemporary world, and urban history – the study of the processes and consequences of urbanization – is one of the most dynamic fields of modern and contemporary history.  Meer

The history of sexuality has progressed from its earlier marginal status to a central place in historiography. Not only are its foci of research intriguing, but the field has initiated important theoretical advances for the discipline as a whole, especially through the work of Michel Foucault.  Meer

The history of medicine has been a robust field of academic inquiry and popular discussion since the 1970s. The interest in it goes back much further, but it was then that it began to link up with social protest and the counter-culture movement, and with feminist politics in particular.  Meer

The rapid rise in the study of Oral History has been evident across a wide range of academic and community settings. From surgeons in England investigating the embodied memories of half-remembered techniques in no longer practiced operations, to truth and reconciliation projects in countries recovering from civil conflict, including in South Africa, Oral History is as diverse and widespread in practice as it is in application.  Meer