The History Book

The ultimate aim of history is human self-knowledge. In the words of20th-century historian R G Collingwood: The value of history is that it teachesus what man has done and thus what man is. We cannot hope to understand ourlives without it.

History itself has a history. From earliest times, all societies literate orpre-literate told stories about their origins or their past, usuallyimaginative tales centring around the acts of gods and heroes. The first literatecivilizations also kept records of the actions of their rulers, inscribed on claytablets or on the walls of palaces and temples. But at first these ancient societiesmade no attempt at a systematic enquiry into the truth of the past; they did notdifferentiate between what had really happened and the events manifest in myth andlegend.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana
The Life of Reason (1905)

It was the Ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Thucydides in the 5th centuryBCE who first explored questions about the past through the collection andinterpretation of evidence the word history, first usedby Herodotus, means enquiry in Greek. Herodotuss workstill contained a considerable mixture of myth, but Thucydides accountof the Peloponnesian War satisfies most criteria of modern historical study. Itwas based on interviews with eyewitnesses of the conflict and attributed eventsto human agency rather than the intervention and actions of the gods.

Thucydides had invented one of the most durable forms of history: the detailednarrative of war and political conflict, diplomacy and decision-making. Thesubsequent rise of Rome to dominance of the Mediterranean world encouragedhistorians to develop another genre of broader scope: the account of howwe got to where we are today. The Hellenic historian Polybius(200118 BCE) and the Roman historian Livy (59 BCE17 CE) bothsought to create a narrative of the rise of Rome a bigpicture that would help to make sense of events on a large timescale.Although restricted to the Roman world, this was the beginning of what issometimes called universal history, which attempts to describeprogress from earliest origins to the present as a story with a goal, giving thepast apparent purpose and direction.

At the same period in China, historian Sima Qian (c.14586 BCE) wassimilarly tracing Chinese history over thousands of years, from the legendaryYellow Emperor (c.2697 BCE) to the Han dynasty under Emperor Wu (c.109BCE).

Moral lessons

As well as making sense of events through narratives, historians in theancient world established the tradition of history as a source of moral lessonsand reflections. The history writing of Livy or Tacitus (56117 CE), forinstance, was in part designed to examine the behaviour of heroes and villains,meditating on the strengths and weaknesses in the characters of emperors andgenerals, providing exemplars for the virtuous to imitate or shun. Thiscontinues to be one of the functions of history. French chronicler JeanFroissart (13371405) said he had written his accounts of chivalrousknights fighting in the Hundred Years War so that brave menshould be inspired thereby to follow such examples. Today, historicalstudies of Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr perform thesame function.