While references to semiotics, discourse theory, and deconstruction have long become intellectual commonplaces in many humanities disciplines, the linguistic turn in historiography is still suspected of robbing historians of their sense of reality. Leading representatives of the field feel they are "on the brink of the abyss," fear "the end of history as a science," and are writing a "Defense of History." In Philipp Sarasin's new book, this highly polemical debate about the foundations of historiography is taken up. In eight essays, some of which are still unpublished, the epistemological foundations of a discourse-analytical historiography are examined, and their possibilities in the field of cultural history are empirically explored.