History, you must understand, is not about the past. It’s a lens for understanding the present (that’s why we fight over what gets taught). It’s way of predicting, even determining the future.

History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

That’s another thing about history: It endures. History is, by its very definition, the story of the past. But the fact that we continue to wrestle with, reinterpret and retell those stories means they’re important. History is not simply names and dates on a page. It is the context of modern life. History explains, for better or worse, how we became what we are today.

“Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.”

History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.

History is not was, it is.

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

In its amplest meaning history includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth. It may aspire to follow the fate of nations or it may depict the habits and emotions of the most obscure individual. Its sources of information extend from the rude flint hatchets of Chelles to this morning's newspaper. It is the vague and comprehensive science of past human affairs.

History is a repository of human experiences and one can not only understand the present by studying history but also find solutions to its problems as well. However, historians sometimes present a very pessimistic view of life whereas at other times, they inspire dejected and disillusioned people to struggle for survival.

History is the continuous reinterpretation of the Past. History is thus continually "true," because, in each Age, the ruling historical outlook and values are the expression of the proper soul. The alternatives for History are not true or false, but effective or ineffective. Truth in the religio-philosophical mathematical sense, meaning timelessly, eternally valid, dissociated from the conditions of Life, does not pertain to History. History that is true is History that is effective in the minds of significant men.

While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities.