San Miguel reads Dominican historical writing as narrative, asking not whether its authors got their facts right but what their stories were built to accomplish. Taking a cue from Hayden White, he looks for the recurring plots — tragic ones above all — that turn up across writers of different centuries and opposed political camps, and treats their errors as constituent parts of a text's meaning rather than as blemishes to be corrected.

The essays move through a sequence of figures. An eighteenth-century chronicler urges the Spanish crown to expand the slave trade so Santo Domingo might rival prosperous Saint-Domingue, and defends the racial purity of a colonial elite he claims descent from. A nineteenth-century writer locates the country's real strength in tobacco-growing peasants and treats racial mixture as an asset. A founding national historian's liberalism and nationalism pull against each other over the conquest. Twentieth-century figures bring historiography and state power together.