In this article, the author explores these questions--from what position, with what focus, and through what methods can a history be produced that is sensible of the conflicts and passions of its own time, and that can illuminate those of the past?--estimating that the books under review in several ways invite such a demanding reading. Gary McCulloch argues for a history that illuminates the past and present of education, attuned to, although not limited by, a record of struggle against "deep seated cultural values and social interests" ("The Struggle for the History of Education," 66). Philip Gardner's book has at its heart the understanding that "there is no such thing as a historical consciousness that is itself placed above history" ("Hermeneutics, History and Memory" 2010, 29, quoting Grondin). Likewise, Jacques Ranciere's new preface to "Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France," entertains the idea that "present forms of capitalism" render his work, first published in 1981, even more "untimely", in the sense that the text is in frontal collision with the accepted verities of the age. In their destruction of social solidarity and creation of precarious forms of employment, "new forms of capitalism" are bringing into being "experiences of work and forms of life that may well be closer to those of the artisans of the past than that of the world of non-material work and frenetic consumption whose complacent picture we are offered" ("Proletarian Nights," xi). More is involved, for all three writers, than the study of the past for its own sake. (Contains 1 note.)