History of the Present is a journal devoted to history as a critical endeavor. Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in making categories of contemporary debate appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. At a time when a journal committed to history as a form of critique is more necessary than ever, History of the Present encourages critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of history as a discipline. Instead of writing about "history" from the abstract philosophical or historiographical perspectives that predominate today, History of the Present offers a rigorous, theoretically informed alternative based mainly on evidence from archives, texts, and other sources.