This introduction to the Historical Encounters-special issue, "Revisiting history and its epistemology", elaborates upon five main themes that emerge across the various papers presented in the issue and speak to tensions within the field of epistemic cognition in history. Of interest, these themes tackle similar questions and pressures on teachers, student teachers, and learners when it comes to the construction and transmission of historical knowledge. Sometimes these themes problematize the whole history teaching project and its reliance on people’s penetrating understandings of history as discipline and its criterialist manner for constructing knowledge. Sometimes these themes seek to better understand what is going on, to then find ways to improve how things are understood or done. Some of the authors in the special issue implicitly, or even explicitly, question the whole history teaching project, while others seek to build on what we have gained as collective knowledge, hoping to take these results further.