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The prominence of history in the twentieth century's shooting wars, as well as in its culture wars, is indisputable. To be sure, it is good to remember that conflict over the meaning of the past usually does not lead directly to armed battle. Yet it is also important to recognize that historical arguments help sustain most of the modern world's major conflicts, armed or not. To whom does Palestine (or the Sudatenland or Kashmir or Mongolia or Kosovo or the Falkland Islands) really belong? What did the Founding Fathers intend as the criterion for impeachment? Was the United States once more moral than it is now? Were women better off before the pill (or World War II or the vote or the Industrial Revolution)?

While contending parties in these and many other arguments offer claims and counterclaims based on historical evidence, radical postmodernist critics have called into question the very belief that history can ever resolve important problems of the present. History, in a radical view, is just window dressing to mask the means by which the powerful hold power. It is no more than human creative imagination exercised upon the miscellaneous detritus surviving from prior generations as supposed "facts."

For the most part, practicing historians possess neither the patience nor the philosophical acumen to take up such global challenges to their discipline. One historian who does possess those virtues, however, is Thomas Haskell of Rice University. His book Objectivity Is Not Neutrality deserves special attention, for it is the most sophisticated contribution by a historian to the contemporary debate over the nature of historical knowledge. At bottom, that debate persistently circles the questions "Did it really happen?" and "Did it really mean something?" The other books examined in this essay all defend in one way or another the possibility of answering those questions in the affirmative. Christian believers have as much to learn from Haskell's careful pragmatism as they do from the surprising religious conclusions of those who defend objective historical knowledge.

Haskell describes himself as a pragmatist along the lines of Charles Sanders Peirce, who at the beginning of the twentieth century outlined procedures by which properly trained communities of acknowledged experts might, through a progress of mutual debate, make genuine progress toward discovering real knowledge in the spheres of their expertise. Haskell identifies his position as being less secure (that is, more pragmatic) than one championing knowledge as a reflection of necessary truths of reason, which he identifies with Plato and the modern savant Leo Strauss. But on the other side, Haskell is very keen to distinguish his "moderate historicism" from what he describes as the radical historicism of Nietzsche, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish, where "truth" in principle can be no more than what I and my friends can accept.

Haskell's assessment of the Realist (Platonic) and Anti-Realist (Nietzsche an) alternatives to his position are bracing because of the scrupulous care he takes in outlining his opponents' positions, the cautious claims he makes for his own views, and, not least, his willingness to concede that the polar positions he rejects solve some problems his own position cannot fully handle. Haskell's mediating view rests on his belief that certain kinds of well-de bated "conventions" provide enough stability for moral practice and his confidence that "communities of the competent" do in fact make progress through their internal arguments to ward a genuine but never fully realized truth.

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