History is literally the study of everything that has ever happened with human beings associated with it. It is the study of change over time, the study of cultures, the study of individuals. It is the study of ideas, of war, of politics, of economics, of science and technology. It is the study of why things happened, it is the study of what could have been different. It is a detective game at times, searching for elusive clues to puzzling riddles, for new sources of evidence and insight. It is an exercise in interpretation of a vast amount of different kinds of data and evidence.

At times it involves a form of radical empathy and extreme subjectivity, in our attempt to inhabit the minds, bodies, and worlds of the long deceased. It is at its heart an empirical narrative craft: we take our interpretations, data, and so forth and turn them into stories that resonate, reveal, and require creativity and art to construct.

At its deepest level, our study is the human condition. Who are we? How did the world end up the way it is? And, let's be honest, we are all somewhat interested in this in part because it lends insight (though not certainty) to the always pressing questions about the future: Where are we going? What kinds of change is possible and desirable?

History is not the only way to study these kinds of questions, or to produce these kinds of works. But it is far more broad in its approaches, more honest in its fallibilities, and more pluralistic and synthetic in its methodology than any other field of study that attempts to answer comparable questions. It happily benefits from insights provided by fields such as archeology, linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, economics, sociology, psychology, and even the "harder" sciences. But it skirts atop all of them, picking and choosing, and producing something (the narrative) that tries to be rich, deep, and plausible.

These narratives can have an "overstuffed couch" quality to them (comfortable but unwieldy, with dubious and uncertain bits and pieces hanging out) especially when contrasted with the colder, harder output that many of these fields desire. But when they work well, they strike something deep in the human mind — narrative is, it seems, the major way that our brains have evolved to understand the world, one of the few cross-cultural givens.

Anyone who thinks any given historical narrative will, by itself, last forever is fooling themselves, because historians know that we, the historians, are embedded in history as well. We accept that, and know that the next generation of historians will, with exquisite care and ability, show why our narratives are "wrong" and theirs are "better." That's fine. The best historians understand that the knowledge we create is of a different sort than the hard sciences, but that doesn't diminish its importance, usefulness, or value.

I am dreadfully, obviously biased, but to study history is to study humanity in its broadest spectrum of forms, with the broadest brushes. To write history is its own magisterial endeavor, a form of empirical creativity that rewards depth and contemplation. It sits at a very comfortable intersection of the arts and the social sciences, but dips a toe in nearly everything else. It rewards the synthetic thinkers, it rewards the dogged searchers, it rewards the storytellers.

History has something for everyone, if you search for it. Those who bore of history are bored of life! Unless they are specifically bored of history class which, we can all acknowledge, is an entirely different thing.

(None of the above should be interpreted to endorse history as a good career move. What is worth doing, and what society values, are two entirely different things, alas! And none of the above necessarily describes how a historian spends most of their days, which can vary depending on what kind of job one really has and where one has it.)