The debates among historians regarding the "crisis in history" have been directed to various problems. The fragmentation of historical scholarship and writing embodied in the "new history," the alleged overspecialization of historical scholarship, and recent challenges to the objectivity of historical fact and interpretation receive attention. Successive chapters attend to a general background study and description of postmodernism, the association between postmodernistic trends and historical scholarship as seen in poststructuralism and deconstruction, and the implications of postmodernistic criticism for post-secondary history instruction. Deconstruction, or the hermeneutical challenge of poetics, is a criticism of historical epistemological presuppositions and practices. Deconstruction yields insights that are useful to judge historical knowing. However, deconstruction does not present a compelling alternative to accepted standards of historical scholarship and practice