In this book, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sometimes irreverent investigation into how modern historiography has developed. Writing about the practice and writing of history, she considers the immutable, stubborn set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the 19th century, with which modern history writing attempts to grapple. Drawing on over five years worth of her own published and unpublished writing, the author has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.