French Canadians are more historically minded than most other North Americans. The historians Gagnon has chosen to feature— Garneau, Ferland, Sulte, and Groulx—have a special significance because they were widely read by generations of their compatriots. They shaped the French Canadians' view of their own past and imprinted their own social and "national" identity.

Gagnon has given attention to the methodology of his historians, their access to sources, and their assessment of historical evidence. His major emphasis, however, is on their historical interpretation, on the values and ideology which explain their selection of events, the importance they give to personalities and to the events themselves. He has also made a sustained effort to put each author in his historical context, to show how the society in which they lived led them to stress certain values and to draw the lessons they did from the past. The analysis of the socio-historical context of each historian's writings, as well as those of their critics and out-riders, is comprehensive and informative. There is no other comparable study of French-Canadian historiography.