What do people consider to be history?

knight1192a: What do people consider to be history?
A recent question, and more to the point an answer to that question, has me wondering what folks consider to be history. Does a controversy, no matter if it’s political or something else, fit your view of history? Or to you is history just important dates and speeches?

See, to me this contrevesy is still a part of history, in fact as I type this it becomes a part of history. History isn’t just important dates and speeches to me. It’s not just the major figures involved in those dates or giving those speeches. It’s everything that has happened or is currently happening. But it’s broken down into the present, recent history, not so recent history, distant history, ancient history, and prehistoric history. Present history are things that are currently happening to within the last few days all others are covered in terms of days and years.

What is history to you?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Kelly
Speaking as a history minor and major officinado:

History is the recurrent pattern. Glory and dreams are the ever important smal laspects that fuel the cycle. People can either refuse to learn and repeat their mistakes, or learn and make new ones.

Yea!!! i love new mistakes.

Answer by Benthebus
History is the past 1 second or 1000 years, but it is real, it shapes who we are and what we do. The mistake people make is thinking of history as a dead subject but it is alive.

We are shaped by the large events in history WW1 and WW2, but also why one line of my family crossed the Atlantic to start a new life in America or why mine went to South Wales,

To know where we are going we must know where we have been.

Answer by steve_geo1
History to me is historiography: What can you know, and how can you know it? I recently finished, “The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and theBarbarians,” by Peter Heather, Oxford professor. It was eye-opening. He uses modern archaeology to show that the barbarians whom Julius Caesar fought were different from those who crossed the Danube in AD 376. He also argues that the empire was just as strong militarily, socially, and financially. He then adduces a densely intertwined argument about how the emperors, East and West, fell into a vicious spiral leading to the end of the empire of the West in 476. I invite you to read the book.

Answer by egn18s
I’m not sure I really understand what you’re getting at with your question. But yeah, history is anything that happened prior to the present. So one minute ago is technically history. Although in common terms, people tend to mean distant history when they say “history”. If they mean something more recent, they specify it as “recent history”. And history also has no requirement to be about famous names and dates. If some random woman washed her husbands toga one day in ancient greece and thought to herself “What a nice clean toga”, thats part of history. because it happens in the past. Isn’t this all kinda obvious?

Answer by sunjeet s
something that happened a long time ago or sometyhing that just happwened yesterday or what I am writng down is history.