ABSTRACT
This book is a collection of short essays by practitioner historians and historical theorists (although this distinction is somewhat arbitrary) who answered the call of the editors of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice to explain why they think about and write history as they do. The first Invitation was made in 1998 and since then the editors have published on average one each year. While we have a variety of Invitations which defy easy classification, what seems clear is that all the invitees made eclectic authorial decisions about how they view the connection between the content of the past and how they think about the historical form they give to it.
