The point of history can be a lot of things depending on the lens in which you’re looking at it, however, I think the point of history is to tell us about ourselves and the world around us. I think I have this opinion because I tend to look at things through a very science-based mindset, in the way that I want to understand the things around me and know how they come/came to be. So, because of this I think it can be extended to history as well. We need to look back at history to learn about the human experience and learn about the things that happened to us and around us in order to understand things that are going to happen or things that have a chance of happening. It’s said that hindsight is 20/20, and even though many things in history aren’t particularly easy to understand and they might not have a very clear cut answer, there is a certain truth to this saying. There is something easier about looking back at things that happened in the past once you’ve had time to clear your head or even if you didn’t have anything to do with the event in the first place. Looking back is always going to be easier that reflecting on something as it happens, but I think that it can be just as important if not more so, because we can see the flaws and the positives in what occured and we can adjust our actions for a more favorable outcome should a similar situation arise later.
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This is exactly why I sometimes tell students I’m not sure projects count as “history” projects if they happened before the year 2000. (Not all my students end up agreeing.) I think one of the advantages of history as a discipline of social analysis is the ability to dissect a moment in time within a context both of what led to that moment and what happened after. Kind of like taking a core sample in time. One thing that historians show over and over is that often, the expected outcome at the time did not happen as anyone expected, and the most common understanding of what was happening was not necessarily true.