No-one has more fully recognized the power of Heidegger's account of history than Richard Rorty: "the whole force of Heidegger's thought," Rorty wrote, "lies in his account of the history of philosophy." And yet, no-one has been more effectively critical than Rorty of Heidegger's failure to connect the history of being to "ordinary history." Rorty took Heidegger to task for "academic parochialism" -- for paying undue attention to the development of philosophy, often to the exclusion of the ordinary history. In this paper, I try to sketch out how Heidegger would respond to this critique by showing how Heidegger's focus on philosophy and philosophers was always intimately connected with, albeit not identical to, an account of ordinary history.