What kind of history is this, man?

What even is history, bro?

History, my dear reader, isn’t just that subject you pretend to pay attention to while doodling swords along the edges of your notebook. History is humanity’s most elegant way of remembering all the nonsense we’ve pulled and, if we get the chance, we are bound to repeat.

History isn’t just one word. It’s three, hiding in plain sight. First, there’s historical time, the endless stream of events, from the invention of the wheel to the day your cousin became a productivity coach. That’s all history. Yesterday’s history. The last election is history. Even the coffee you reheated and forgot in the microwave counts, though with little documentary importance unless, of course, you’re an anthropologist of everyday failure.

Historical science and historiography

Then comes historical science: those serious folks (or almost serious) who study historical time, sift through the garbage of centuries, and try to figure out how we ended up in this hole. They might use documents, objects, paintings, love letters, meeting minutes, memes… anything humans have left behind, like trying to reconstruct a party just from the broken glasses.

And finally, there’s historiography, the way all of this gets written down. History with a capital H. In other words, after the historian digs, questions, compares, argues with colleagues in seminars, and drinks one too many coffees, they write a book. That book becomes the “official” *history”… until another historian comes along and declares it all wrong. And so, we go on: an eternal Ctrl+Z of the truth.

Ah, and don’t be fooled because the past doesn’t change. But what we make of it changes all the time. Herodotus, that curious Greek who kicked the whole thing off, called it investigation. I call it a desperate attempt to make sense of the chaos. In the end, history is exactly that: people trying to understand people, time trying to swallow everything, and a few old folks (like me) trying to write down what’s left.

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