Historical research is connected to the idea of change and in our ways of understanding it. Inspired by the past and gazing towards the future, historians are needed as critical and self-critical participants in the search for changes and new directions.

These changes are discussed in the present book, based on the themes and papers presented at the History and Change Conference, which was organised in autumn 2001 at the University of Turku. The themes of the conference were Changing Roles of Women and Men, Changing Cultural and Technical Environment and Changing Politics in the 20th-Century Europe, and the contributions to this book follow these lines.