The query made famous by Pontius Pilate in the first century A.D. has reverberated down through the centuries in many forms and in a variety of settings. But in seeking to answer the question, "What is truth?", one quickly discovers that the result depends above all on what is allowed to count as true. There is no necessary agreement from one cultural context to another and from one time to another about how truth is to be established. The problem is especially acute where the historian is concerned. The noble dream of providing a true, unbiased, objective account of the past "as it really happened" has been both defended as necessary and attacked as impossible virtually ever since Leopold Ranke set forth the challenge in the nineteenth century.