This chapter sets the stage for the subsequent four by discussing how the leaders of the period of ‘national organization’ used history for the purpose of nation building, through to the emergence of revisionism as a counter-narrative. It first examines the institutional bases upon which Argentine historians constructed their accounts of the past, and how politics and history related to each other in the process of their emergence, and then analyses the kind of authority from which writers of history derived their right to take part in debates. The aim is to set revisionism in the context of historical debates in Argentina from a long-term perspective and to explain the reasons behind the rise, from the 1930s onwards, of this divisive nationalist version of the past.