Macpherson can be understood as an historian in two related contexts: first, through recent scholarship on eighteenth-century history writing; and, second, by placing Macpherson in the emerging world of Enlightenment history writing during the 1760s and 1770s. This book interprets Macpherson using a framework about history writing derived from three key scholars: J. G. A. Pocock, Mark Salber Phillips, and Karen O’Brien. Through their work on David Hume, Hugh Blair, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and others, these scholars have established the different ways in which these esteemed historians wrote about the past, placing them in the broader context of developing Enlightenment thought. While Pocock, Phillips and O’Brien examine broader changes in how history writing evolved across the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, all have a focus on the period from the 1750s to 1780s, when their subjects were most active and when we see the development of a largely Scottish method of historical sociology. Macpherson, as an historian, becomes a fascinating case study of how history writing was changing in this period. It is not that Macpherson is necessarily a better example of these changes – simply, that he is part of this intellectual community and that placing him in this context helps us to understand both this period and Macpherson. For those interested in Macpherson, it is a way of overcoming the Ossian impasse; for those who focus on Enlightenment historiography, this approach helps us to trace the pathways and effects of key ideas about history writing across non-canonical writers and texts. In situating Macpherson within the genealogies of Enlightenment historiography, we can get a better understanding of how earlier ideas about historical narrative, truth and fidelity, and history's purpose as an instrument of amusement and instruction, developed into a broader mode of explanatory writing that combined narrative, philosophy and erudition. Macpherson's history writing was heavily influenced by historians from earlier in this period, such as Hume, Blair and Smith, especially when Macpherson lived in Edinburgh during the 1760s and was in close contact with all three, particularly Blair. However, as history writing developed during the 1770s and became more concerned with the scholarly use of primary source evidence to account for historical change, Macpherson's work serves as a useful barometer of these historiographical innovations.