What is History? This is actually a more difficult and debated question than it would first seem. To the average mind, particularly having gone through public education, history is what the textbook said and what the teacher tested me on. Boring dates and battles memorized by rote or movies we watched while the teacher was busy. The more banal rendering would be these guys did this to those guys.
In reality history is much more than this. History relies on collecting written documents, archeology, use and nuance of language, art and poetry and weaving it into a narrative of a given people or culture. But how do we know that? For example, have you ever stopped and asked: “How do we know what we’re told about ‘x’ is true?” This is a far more complicated question. When you look at an artist’s conception of what Ancient Rome looked like, how do you know it really looked this way? While it might not be hard to figure out what the Flavian Ampitheatre (Coliseum) looked like, what about a street model or plan of Ancient Rome? In reality these are guesses based on archeology or what few monuments survive form the period. In the end we don’t really know that. So what can we know about history?