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Scott proposes that literary approaches offer us one way to read how identities are discursively constituted and understood as and of experience. She encourages us to read for and write how histories (personal, political, and social) are constructed and constructive. This article focuses on how difference, knowledge production, and witnessing produce identities as "not something that was always already there simply waiting to be expressed, not something that will always exist in the form it was given." In particular, the author considers her experience as a mother alongside Julia Kristeva's essay "Stabat Mater," which contrasts Catholic understandings of motherhood and femininity with her own experience of maternity, and Minne Bruce Pratt's poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which confronts the loss of Pratt's children following her coming out as a lesbian.

The book opens by considering the varieties of censorship, from suppression, dismissal, and defamation to persecution and murder. Part I, "Kill switch," tells the tragic story of how the censorship of history has sometimes turned into deadly crimes against history, with chapters looking at topics such as historians and archivists being killed for political reasons, attacks by political leaders on historians, iconoclastic breaks with the past, and fake news. Part II, "Fragile freedom," reverses the perspective and examines how the censorship of history has backfired. Chapters consider the subversive power of historical analogies and resistance to the censorship of history. The book also contains a "Provisional memorial for history producers killed for political reasons (from ancient times until 2017)". It is a double tribute: to the history producers who were killed and to those who mustered the courage to resist the blows of censorship.