At a time when the content of history curricula in schools is being debated, when what should be commemorated is established by law, Shlomo Sand asks: isn't every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do not political sensitivities and the power of states weigh disproportionately on history research and its teaching? And, under these conditions, can there be a morally neutral and "scientific" historical truth? In describing the picture of a vast history of history, from Mesopotamia to the present day, he denounces the methods with which historians have constructed modern national mythologies, or the current tendency to make the historian the priest of official memory or the forger of national identities. In doing so, Shlomo Sand also delivers a personal work, where controversy gives way to confession, to the disillusioned balance of his more than forty-year relations with the discipline, and to a provocative question: "why study history today?" Certainly not out of pure devotion to collective memory, he suggests, but to better free oneself from a fabricated past, and to look resolutely to the future.