What history writing is about, post-modernists argue, is power. Such people advocate the study of history for its own sake because this will stop disempowered groups in society thinking about how they might change things to their own advantage. Even works written ostensibly as a vindication of the historian's profession, such as Telling the Truth About History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, conclude that while the variety of interpretations historians can advance about the past is not as unlimited as post-modernists claim, the objective limits to which it is subject are imposed not by the reality of the past itself, or the nature of the documents relating to it, but by the existence of a community of scholars with agreed rules about how those documents can be interpreted. Anyone who thinks that the truth about the past does not matter should take a look at the reaction of people in the Soviet bloc after the fall of communism, and note the feeling of liberation that the truth was at last being told about the past. Certainly, white males have written the majority of history books published in Europe and the US in the last century or so.
History is about bridging a gap in experience between the present and the past.
Many women have written excellent history books about men, just as blacks have written about white slave owners. No one, surely, would wish to argue that the only people who can understand the white males of the past are the white males of the present. In any case, white male historians have successfully written about many aspects of oppression and exploitation in the past without themselves having been oppressed or exploited. There is a bigger danger lurking for the unwary post-modernist. For their arguments can apply to the politics of oppression and violence as much as to the politics of empowerment and liberation.