In the last twenty years there has been a sustained and remarkable growth of historical and public interest in the `Holocaust'. The proliferation of academic work on all aspects of the history of the Holocaust, accompanied more recently by a burgeoning scholarship on genocide in general, has been matched by an enormous output of `private' and `public' history, from memoirs and recollections by `survivors' to films and documentaries, websites of all kinds and the official commemoration of the Holocaust in museums, exhibitions and days of remembrance. The Holocaust has thus been transformed from a specialised branch field of historical enquiry into a contemporary cultural phenomenon. This module encourages you to reflect critically on this phenomenon by setting the history of the Holocaust into its wider context. This will involve study of: the history of the persecution of the Jews since the Middle Ages; the changing nature of antisemitism in Europe over the centuries; the emergence of a racial-political antisemitism at the end of the 19th century; the impact of the First World War on attitudes to minorities and on the propensity for more violent assertions of nationhood; Nazi practices of isolation, Aryanisation, deportation and ghettoisation; the German war of racial annihilation in the East and the implementation of the `Final Solution'; the experience, motivations and psychology of the `ordinary' perpetrator; the testimony of those who survived the Holocaust; the relationship of the Holocaust to other genocides; the challenges of representing and teaching the Holocaust. The module will therefore enable you to reflect more widely on what history is, how we do it, and why we do it; on the methods one can use, the questions one can ask, the variety of sources one can tackle and why history matters.