How do you both draw on contemporary concepts, categories, and identities to make sense of the past in ways that are meaningful for the present and challenge their apparent obviousness? How do you both trace the structural continuities of forms of power and privilege across time and draw attention to other ways of being that have been effaced or supplanted by newer configurations of sexual and gender identity? This chapter engages these historiographic issues, and the significance of history for queer and trans studies, from several different angles, including the stakes of centering race and empire, the ways scholars have conceptualized eroticism and embodiment in periods before the advent of the concepts of homosexuality and transsexuality, the question of whether particular historical persons and social dynamics should be understood as queer or trans, the influence of discourses of inversion, and scholarly articulations of queer and trans temporalities.