These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.