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This article argues that El tragaluz (1967) by Antonio Buero Vallejo can be understood as a series of reflections on the nature of history as a discipline. It explores the literary representations of the historian that appear in Buero’s piece: El and Ella, the scientists of the future that look back at the year 1967; and the family members that write and rewrite the events of tragic moment they lived at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Drawing on the work of two intellectuals of the period, Hyden White and Robert Nisbet, this essay discusses the processes of construction of the historical text. In Buero, the ideal historian embarks on his work by asking an apparently marginal question, ‘Who’s that?’, and the result is the production of a historical text that aims to include a myriad of perspectives in a manner which challenges the ideology of Franco’s dictatorship.