Yes, of course. First, postmodernists didn't invent the notion that history is written in narratives and that narrative structures have their own complicated issues, and they do not have a monopoly on it. Second, while there have long been some people who really think that history is "scientific," there have also always been people who emphasized the importance of interpretation, subjectivity, and even ideology. So none of this is as black-and-white as one might caricature it to be.

But in terms of practicing historians today, nearly all of the ones I know personally would not describe themselves as postmodernists, but they would also not describe themselves as naive empiricists (of, say, a Rankean stereotype). People fall somewhere in between. Historians are empiricists in that we are really trying to talk about something that happened in the past and we are using evidence for that. This applies even to postmodernists though the definition and standards of evidence might vary (as they always have). Thoughtful historians are also very aware of the way in which narrative is the primary medium of history (as opposed to, say, graphs or numbers), and that telling a story of any sort involves structural elements that can predetermine some of the output. Not everyone is explicitly read-up on the ins-and-outs of narratology (the study of narrative tropes) but we are all storytellers to some extent and we are aware of the fact that there are always a million ways to tell a story. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has tried to tell a new story based on evidence is not aware to some extent of the way in which they are personally making decisions and choices about what to tell, how to tell, and the way in which different kinds of stories support different kinds of arguments.

Just because something is a narrative doesn't mean it can't be true or it can't be empirical. I can tell you a great story of how I spent my day today, and I could probably provide you with reams of evidence if you really wanted it (receipts and e-mails would alone tell you a lot). Just because it's a story doesn't mean it's not non-fiction. That being said, nobody would be foolish enough to mistake a recollection for the thing-itself, and it doesn't take a lot of work to realize that I could tell the same story in several different ways if I wanted to emphasize different things (e.g., the same day, with just little changes in emphasis, could be an example of how hard I work, or it could be an example of how lazy I am — it's all about what you leave in and leave out, and what you emphasize).

To make an empirical narrative you are really just trying to line up a plausible account of things. If I gave you a statement like, "today I went to the Moon," you'd probably decide this was implausible on the face of it, because it seems very unlikely. However if I marshaled a lot of evidence that I was in fact an astronaut, that NASA had just sent a mission to the Moon, that I was the guy on the mission, etc., I could persuade you that I indeed had done what I said. (Alternatively, I could reveal that "The Moon" was a bar and then you'd see the narrative was true but misleading.) This is not unique to history — this is how people convince other people that something is true. Science papers are written with a narrative structure and style (and with plenty of tropes and techniques) to convey a certain type of truth. (For example, scientific papers make judicious use of passive tense when they want to gloss over details about who did actual work — "x was done" is an effective way to erase apparent human agency but also technicians who often don't get listed as authors! Consider the implication of the de facto banishment of the term "I" from scientific papers, as well.) The narratologists would point out that narrative is something core to human understanding of causality and change and thus inherent in any account. (When you interpret and explain "raw data," you are making the narrative that makes it plausible. When you attack someone's theory or facts, you find ways to attack their narrative — you change their story by pointing out flaws, biases, errors, etc.)

This can seem overly mystical and gnomic sometimes, but it is pretty straightforward epistemology. We are narrative-making creatures. History is a form of empirical narrative. One weighs the values of sources differently at times, and sometimes different from narrative sources in, say, physics, but that is not at all counter to the empirical approach but has always been core to it (Ranke would not tell you to believe everything you find written down, obviously). But it is entirely a separate question whether historical narratives have the same epistemic status as, say, narratives in the hard sciences, or even narratives in the social sciences.

My experience with the really hardcore "postmodernists" (whatever that means) is that they enjoy pointing out that there is not a total connection between empirical facts and interpretative narratives, and that is totally true. But it does not mean that one just gives up the enterprise or that the narratives have no meaning. There are precious few people, postmodernists included, who actually live their lives as if empirical narratives are meaningless.

I think the real challenge is not to be a post-postmodernist historian but to be a post-postmodernist scientist. Scientists generally do not like to acknowledge that they use narrative tropes, they do not like to acknowledge that there is no such thing as uninterpreted "raw data," they do not like being told that experiments have a tricky relationship with understanding. They can tend to think of themselves as narrative-free, that they are neutral reporters of "just the facts." For them to lose their hold on the idea of an unobstructed connection to natural reality has much higher stakes.

But historians have always had a much deeper connection to narratives, and arguably a much better appreciation of the "gap" between "what happened" and "what we can plausibly say about it," so I think that it is not such a big difficult to assimilate any useful observations from postmodernists into their practice. The place that historians disagree is more about what kind of narrative you are going to write and what kind of thing you are going to look at — a Derridean obscurantist hyper-analysis of a single text, for example, is only going to be appealing to some people. But again, there have always been many different ways to do history, I am not sure this is a unique "challenge."

In short, if you actually internalize that narratives are necessarily the means by which humans convey complex meaning, then it follows, as I see it, that 1) there's probably no way out of it, 2) it is common to all epistemology, not just history, and so one doesn't have to feel bad about it, and 3) the trick is to be aware of it, to be in control of it, and not try and being naive about it in the face of preserving some kind of epistemic authority (which is illusive anyway).