History is not “the past.”  The past is only what happened.  It is irretrievable.  It is a ghost.  And yet there’s not really a present, either, because every individual moment is so brief that “the present” leaves you suspended with one foot in yesterday, the other in tomorrow.  Every instance of self-examination in your life is putting together just what the past—your life, in other words—really means, and certainly what it means going into the future.  That is history, and every sentient person is an historian to one degree or another.  Writ large: a culture without history is as useful and stable as a person without a memory.

History began as an art, raising rhetoric in relief out of the marble slab of the past.  After years of alleged progress towards merging with the social sciences, history has, with the advent of postmodernism, reverted back to where it began with Thucydides.  Like every other art, it’s a meritocracy, a vitally important community of those who would rather understand the world than have its supposed lessons understood for them.  And like every other art, it has a sort of magic to it.  It doesn’t restore order to a brutal and chaotic world; it creates it.