Is every human (and nonhuman?) action history?

by pier4r

I don't know if this is more a philosophical question or a meta question. I had some stimuli some months ago (i.e: crashcourse: bighistory) that let me ponder if we can consider every human action history. Yes, i mean also this post in some minutes.

I would say yes, but i would like to know from other persons that are fond to history or called themselves historians.

PS: i'm sorry if this question is redundant but i didn't find it.

IronicCarepost

This is really more an ontological question than a history question, ontological meaning about existence and what things are.

I suspect, though, you're confusing history and the past.

History like we talk about it here is basically a collection of evidence and questions which are related by all being focused on what has happened before now. The past is everything that has happened, regardless of if it was recorded, or anyone knew about it, or if anything was affected by it. So, a human action like "I ran a charity auction today" might never be recorded or questioned or have questions asked about it in all of the future. You could probably say that it wasn't history then, and so the answer to the question "Is everything we do history" would be no, because we have an example which is something being done, but not being history. It is still, however, the past because it happened.

alriclofgar

I would say that every human (and yes, non-human) action could become history, but is not history in and of itself. As /u/ironiccarepost says, history is different from the past. History is, fundamentally, a narrative - a story. What events make it into the story (and what occurences become 'events') is flexible, and depends both on the story you want to tell, the methods you use to tell it, your own preferences, biases, blindnesses, and insights, and of course your ability to access data about things that happened in the past.

Historians can use data about all sorts of things to write their stories - I'm currently writing a chapter that includes wood grain, sharpening iron, metallurgy and an anthroplogical study of lab science, a database of 600 medieval graves, and magic. All the pieces fit together into a story about how weapons were made in the sixth century, and that story - if it makes it through peer review and is published - will be history. But the actions of the blacksmiths and carpenters and archaeologists in the lab that I'm describing are just things that happened, they're not in themselves historical. Not until they're put together into a story about the past.