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The last part of Iggers's book leads naturally to the expert account of the American scene provided by Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob. Unlike Iggers, these three distinguished historians do not regard the modern situation as a crisis. They point out at the start of their book that their own participation in the historical profession, as women from nonelite social backgrounds, could not have happened without the intermingled social and intellectual changes of recent decades. Yet these authors do want to discriminate between welcome aspects of the forces that upset traditional history writing and symptoms of revolutionary excess that they think go too far.

In their account, the collapse of three previous "absolutisms" are most important. First was a heroic myth about the United States' own history interpreted as the rise of "the successful male white Protestant, whose features were turned into ideals for the entire human race." Against this myth have arisen various forms of social history that treat once-marginalized populations (women, African Americans, workers, immigrants) as important historical actors. The result is sharp contention among proponents of these various groups as to which of them is most central or important for the truest understanding of America's real history. Much of the recent controversy over the National History Standards came from this kind of contention.

Second, according to our authors, was a myth about the intellectual purity of science. So long as this myth survived, historians could dignify their labor by showing how careful archival research resembled the research of scientists, because it sought verifiable conclusions drawn from facts arranged objectively to tell the truth. Against this myth arose the subversive notion that science too was a social process (or, more radically, a social construction), much more like other products of human mental activity like art, nationalism, or religious belief than had previously been thought. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 1962 was the catalyst for this revolutionary assault. The tremors resulting from this work also shook the ground on which historians stood—if scientific procedures were governed by much larger social conventions and did not necessarily yield pristine, irrefragable, objective results, how much less history, with its incomplete "data sets," its inability to replicate "experiments," and its lack of "verifiable" proof for conclusions.

Third were myths about the ability of language to reflect reality or, put another way, the unexamined assumption that statements about human conditions were indeed really about those conditions rather than about the ones who made the statements. Here the precipitate of tumult was writing from Europe, often France, suggesting that language revealed much more about how humans perceived ("constructed") their experience than what they found in a supposedly "real" world (Jacques Derrida), and that statements about human activities in the past were mostly encrypted devices aimed at solidifying relationships of power in the present (Michel Foucault). For history writing, such assertions threatened notions about recreating the past wie es eigentlich gewesen as remorselessly as they undercut notions about historians' ability to float free above the political conflicts of their own day. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob go on in Telling the Truth About History to show why they think destruction of the mythic absolutes was not as disastrous as some cultural commentators fear, but the most important contribution of their volume remains its diagnosis of the current historiographical situation.

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