History
Overview
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

s. It is a field of research which uses a narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...

 to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events.
Quotations

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Henry Ford, Interview in Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916)

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal, Interview in: Butt, Nr. 20, Special Summer 2007, S. 63.

If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.

Howard Zinn, Speech on "War and Social Justice" at Binghamton University on November 8th, 2008.

 
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