Trouillot's subject is how historical narratives get made, and by whom. They are produced unevenly, by groups and individuals with markedly unequal access to the means of production, and the forces involved — quieter than gunfire or property — are not for that reason weaker. He refuses both the claim that we are captives of the past and the claim that history is simply whatever anyone makes of it.

The opening example is the Alamo. Santa Anna took the mission in March 1836 and lost at San Jacinto six weeks later, where Houston's men shouted its name as they attacked. In doing so they made history twice over: as actors capturing a general, and as narrators who converted a defeat into the trial that made victory inevitable.

That doubleness runs through the book, which works on the ambiguity of the word itself — what happened, and what is said to have happened — and on the silences that separate them.