Looking first at the processes which have "professionalized" history and at the relations between what is coming to be called public history (museums, the heritage industry and the mass media) and academic history, Jordanova considers areas that she believes are of particular importance. The text examines the way historians have "divided up" their subject, and how that has changed and with what effects. Why have certain fields, such as women's history and black history, generated such intense debates about their value and validity? History has frequently been seen as something of a jackdaw subject, with a tendency to appropriate theories and concepts from other areas. Is that assumption justified? What is the nature of the links with adjacent fields, such as anthropology and literary theory? What is the status of historical knowledge? Is it in some sense objective or should we agree with those who are dismissive of such claims?
Jordanova refuses to mystify what historians do and treats historical methods critically; she also resists the separation of theory from practice and finishes with a personal view of where the discipline is going, indicating the challenges it faces and why its future is significant.