This paper explores the power history holds for advancing organization studies and suggests that the historic turn in organization theory can 1) result in a new space for the application of organizational analysis; 2) work as an hermeneutical framework in a more self-conscious attempt to locate organization studies within their own histories; or 3) transform organization studies into 'new historicism,' a literary genre. The paper investigates the intellectual roots of history as a discipline, and confirm the discipline as a stubborn bastion of empiricism/positivism, although exhibiting an increasing loss of appetite for naturalism. The paper also surveys historians' attempts to maintain a privileged third ground between natural science and literature, a tactic that resembles organization scholarship, and details the growing fascination with current reconceptualizations of the theory of history that lead to the notion of history as a form of narrative.