Any subject, even one as widely accepted as history, needs to justify its study. Its supporters need to convince an audience that it provides a useful perspective on the choices people have made and the consequences of those decisions. In this sense, history is unique among all subjects: It allows students to explore the great range of accommodations humans have devised to their environment and to see how those adaptations have shaped the world as we know it.
In addition to its practical value, history is a subject that harbors beauty. Many people find it stimulating to study the past and to imagine how things might have been different, or how they could have been the same. It also offers the opportunity to see how human societies have evolved while maintaining their cohesion, which can provide insight into the future.
It is important to distinguish between objective and subjective history. The former refers to the actual events of history; the latter is man’s conception of those events, which changes with each age. For example, the ages of Pericles and Augustus share much in common, yet historians can point to differences in titles, government, ceremonial, and even the types of diseases afflicting the populations.
The purpose of history is not to merely record the past but to learn from it. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger puts it, “the study of history is not an attempt to understand what happened; it is a way of understanding why things happened.” This is a different approach than simply memorizing names and dates, which remains an essential skill for some purposes but has no place in a true understanding of history.
There are many ways to interpret history, and the nature of a historical event will determine which interpretations are most meaningful for any given time period. For example, the fact that Wilma Rudolph was an international track and field star and Olympian in the 1950s and 1960s makes her a significant figure for studies of women’s sports, but she would not be relevant to research on the Vietnam War or any other contemporary event.
Historians and students of history also face the challenge of determining which facts to include in their study. Those who teach the subject will naturally include events that are of the highest interest or significance to their audience, while those who read and write about it have to make some choices about what to highlight in their writings and lectures.
As a result, most histories consist of primary sources – the raw materials that form history. Secondary sources are the books, articles and other works that come out after the fact – which serve to give the primary material meaning and context. They may be highly scholarly, with an emphasis on original research and a careful evaluation of other historians’ work, or they may be textbooks that are designed to present the facts in an easily digestible format for a non-expert reader.