History Defined
The word history comes from the French word histoire which means ‘story’. History can thus be defined as the organization and presentation of past or bygone events. Anything that has already happened could be termed as history. The already happened events will have an effect in the future even if it is in the least of ways. The events are written down in a record for study and referencing and this makes up history. These events normally follow a strict chronological order especially those affecting a country, institution, art or science. The events could be that of a biography, which is a record of a person’s life or even a memoir which is history composed of a personal experiences, observations and memorable times.
In a broader perspective, history could be defined as the stories of the human’s past or a recording of the past events. The people who study about past events are called historians. Historians use books, archival materials, artifacts, newspapers, videos or any other printed documents as primary sources of information. They use the information obtained from these sources to compose narratives, sequences and patterns of the past events. They are mainly interested in why certain outcomes happened and how they are related to the earlier events.
The study of history mainly concentrates on the reasons why the events happened and even the historians are interested in the casualty of the past events. It is studied through records that were written or presented orally thus history covers all the events that happened after the invention of the writing era. Any events that occurred prior to the invention of writing are not encompassed in history and are termed as pre-history. Historians use pre-history to recover the knowledge of the past in circumstances where there were no written records or where the writing of a culture is not well understood. Therefore, history is a record of past events and why the events happened, mainly involving human beings.
References
Benjamin, Jules R. A Student’s Guide to History (2009)
http://www.brainyquote.com/words/hi/history173712.htmlhttp://www.answers.com/topic/history
