Abstract

Two views about the objects of history have traditionally been opposed: the realist, which holds that history is about past actuality: and the constructionist, which holds that history cannot be about a past actuality but rather it is about what survives the materials and procedures of historical research. I shall suggest that both of these views may well agree that, as regards the practice of historical inquiry, an historian is constrained by what survives the materials and procedures of historical research. And this agreement provides the basis for raising questions about the very distinction between the epistemology and the ontology of history.