Since EH Carr's "What is History?" there has been debate and discussion over the purpose of History, historians, and which outputs are most important for academic work.
What does everyone here think?
Humans don't live in the present - our brains are constantly playing catchup, interpreting stimuli from the world around us, simplifying those stimuli, and compiling them into an actionable picture of our surroundings that we can use to make decisions. By the time our brains have processed something, the world has already moved on, and our perception isn't reality - it's a story told about the immediate past. Everything we experience is, quite literally, a history: a simplified, interpreted story about events that have happened and gone. We live in an ever-moving historical narrative set 1 second in the world's past, and our brains can never reach up to the present.
When we study the deep past, we're extending our everyday experience of interpreting reality beyond the near instantaneous processes of daily life into something much more challenging, but also much more full of possibilities. When we experience life, we see the world's immediate past from a single perspective, and we tell a story about events that depends entirely upon our own senses. But when we study events further in the past, what we lose by our inability to be there and see it with our own eyes is made up for by our ability to see events from a multitude of perspectives. We can read the accounts of others who experienced the events, study the social conditions in which events occurred, look at the material objects which shaped past decisions and conflicts, and study these actions' far-reaching effects. We gain perspective, and learn how the small stories we tell about our own lives fit into larger movements of humans, societies, and the many non-human animals, objects, and materials that make up the world we live in.
So history gives us perspective on what it means to be an observer of the world and storyteller. It doesn't allow us to predict future events (though it can certainly teach us wisdom), it doesn't allow us to understand all the many factors that created the present world we live in (though it can help us see some that would be otherwise hidden), and it doesn't doesn't tell us who we are (though it can teach us to imagine greater possibilities for ourselves). What it does teach us is that the world is much more complicated than what we see with our own eyes, and that the stories we tell about our own lives could be much richer if we understood our own experiences to be every bit as complex and multifaceted as the events we study in the past. History is a method for storytelling: it teaches us to transform real events in the deep past into complex stories of human lives, and that lesson can and should transform how we understand what it means to be a human being, living in a world defined by competing and always changing stories, today. And it can help us rewrite those stories in a way that allows them to transcend the limits of individual experience and perception to make them more fully reflect the richness of human experience.
Have you ever heard the saying "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it?"^1 If we do not know what our forebearers did, and the result of those actions, than we are doomed to make the same mistakes they did. (Related: "A fool doesn't learn from his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. And a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.") In many modern situations you can see shades of the past: compare the current banking crisis to the South Seas Trading Company bubble. If we had learned from the South Seas Trading Company's mistakes, could we have avoided the banking crisis? Additionally, how could we have learned those lessons without studying history?
But also the study of history tells us about ourselves; our nation and our people and how we fit into the world. By learning where we came from we learn where we're going. We cannot steer ourselves to the future we want/need/deserve without an understanding of where we came from.