To uncover the mystery of how we ended up in our present situation. History is about prologue, the introduction and setup required of every story (because if you jumped right in, you'd be confused as shit).

And I stress "the mystery" because much of history is about asking whether the things we think we know about this prologue to our world, actually were the case, on the basis of evidence and logical presumptions.

Also fortune telling.

“The purpose of history is to cite the past in order to explain the future. When a phenomenon occurs in the world, look to see what comparable events are recorded." — Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179–104 b.c.)

I'll leave the involved comments about justifying the humanities in an age of runaway corporatist idolatry to those wiser and go with:

People love Hubble space telescope images. It tells them where they came from. It tells them where they're going.

-astronaut Storey Musgrave

I once read that history is the only academic discipline non-academics read eagerly, seriously, and for fun. The question isn't why study history. If you're human, the question is, why not.

A number of users including myself, u/ThucydidesWasAwesome and u/restricteddata answered a similar question a couple of years ago. You might find their responses illuminating.

But since you asked I have some further thoughts since I last opined two years ago. I should preface this by saying my academic background isn't in history, it's in philosophy, literature and theology, and I started studying history seriously after I graduated. My answer is informed by this background - both my own intellectual development and by my training (as you'll probably see...my thoughts are a little...abstract).

First of all, history is the study of the specific, and this sets it apart from many other disciplines. It is also what makes history very useful to people who want to understand the world around them. By the specific (I could also say the particular), I mean the individuality of events, people, places and times - what makes them themselves, what is unique to them, what makes them and them alone tick.

Generally speaking science (most branches, anyway), philosophy, theology and mathematics seek to answer questions in terms of general laws and axioms, find universal truth or to abstract the world we see into rational terms. For instance, mathematicians deal in abstract and universal terms - number theory doesn't care about -what- exactly you are counting, but how you count it. A triangle will have the same geometrical properties whether you are using it to find your position on a map of to build a cathedral. Philosophy and theology, pretty obviously, are about trying to find universal truths about ethics, the nature of reality, whether God exists and if so what is she like, and that kind of thing. The physical sciences are much more complicated (because they aren't one thing but many, and because each has its own methods) but broadly speaking, they are analytical and seek to explain the things we see around us in the world in terms that can be universally applied. A crude example from physics is how Newton developed laws of motion that apply to both the stars and to a falling apple (or so the legend has it). So these other fields of study might be described as universalizing disciplines, which seek to relate the particular to the universal, or even to sidestep the particular (and all its messiness) in favor of arriving directly at a universal truth. At least, this was my experience studying mathematics and philosophy and theology in Undergrad, along with studying the methods of various scientists, Ancient and Modern.

History is different. I think it often doesn't want to be different. Many people who have studied history want it to be a matter of universal laws and abstract forces that can reduce the messiness of human action to a few first principles that can be applied across different times, places and cultures. But the events themselves and the records we have of them are stubborn. They are too varied, too complex, and too damned individual to be explained in any terms other than their own. As soon as someone posits a general theory of historical causality, twelve other historians can provide some counterexample from their own studies. And so they have, so far, refused to subject themselves to any general principle of universal law. There are no Newtonian Laws of History (much to the chargrin of liberal Whigs and orthodox Marxists alike). Instead, every historical event must be studied in itself. It has its own causes, which will be different than the causes of some other event on the other side of the world or even right next door. The more we look at it, the more individual it becomes - the more we study it, the more we know, not about history in general, but about that event itself, in its own weirdness.

Now this isn't to say that there aren't similarities between times and places, that there aren't broad classes of explanation that can be broadly applied to a number of phenomena (Marx was probably on to something when he talked about the means of economic production being pretty important to the way societies organize and understand themselves, for instance). But every generalization has a dozen caveats, and the more broadly applied it is the more true that becomes. And I would argue that it is those caveats that tell us the most, because they tell us what makes each time and place different from every other time and place.

To historians, these annoying particulars aren't statistical noise. They're the meat of our study. They're why you can read a PHD thesis about armourers in London in the 14th century that doesn't touch on the 15th century because 'that would be too broad.' They're why one of the best books on armour produced in the past decade focuses on one country for a 50 year period. Moreover, speaking for myself, these stubborn particulars are why I do what I do. Just like the people I care about are defined by their foibles and eccentricities, the things I study are defined by their own customs, their own stories, their own personality. And I think that's what makes past times and places worth studying - they are so much themselves, and so different than our own world.

And where does that leave us? To quote myself:

I think one underrated thing the critical study of history does is challenge our own certainties about what is universal or essential in human nature, or even universal or essential to say, an ideology or a religion or a country. We often assume that people are essentially like ourselves, and they must value what we value. Doubly so when they are our own ancestors - people who read the same holy books and the same Constitution (if we are American) as ourselves.

But if we allow ourselves to study the past and the people if the past as things in themselves, we learn how different they were from us. They read the same Bible but interpretted it in an entirely different way - they had a different understanding of the Constitution, they lived lives different from our own. And if we open ourselves to just how different they are from us, we can maybe see just how malleable and changeable human beings are. Even stranger, these people who live so long ago by their own actions and -for their own reasons- in some sense brought about the world we live in. -Not- because they existed for the sake of us, or because they necessarily -wanted- the world we live in now to look how it did, but because their actions had consequences they could not forsee. Ours will too, someday. It is humbling but enlightening.

On a less abstract level, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the methods of history - discovering the particularity and individuality of a time and place - are useful in understanding our own world. Because the history that is unfolding now is like the history that came before - it is complex, and each event is individual and ultimately irreducible. The events in the world around us must be studied as things in themselves, not just as manifestations of broad trends or small pieces of some larger meta-narrative.

I got through most of a psychology degree before I had to do a history of psychology subject. And, to be honest, before I did that history of psychology subject, a degree in psychology often seemed oddly disjointed. Like...the methods and practices of social psychology seemed like an entirely different world to cognitive psychology or personality psychology. The way we learned things was a bit weird, and what was with all that statistics?

And it was studying the history of psychology that made it make sense: oh, that was why it's like that. Because, of course, the way things are, in 2018, often has little to do with the way things should be if you had to start anew; instead, they're the way they are because it was easier to evolve from something previous than actually start anew. And because psychologists use methods and ideas that, perhaps, used to make sense when people thought a fundamentally different way about how the mind works, but which make much less sense now.

And that brings us to the other thing that's useful about knowing about the past - it makes you reconsider the way things are. Read some decent history and you'll discover that some of the things that we think are absolutely normal - the things we think are the way they've always been, the things we might just implicitly assume rather than ever think about - are not actually necessarily the way it has to be. Sometimes people talk about the way that history teaches you that new things that happen are really just new wine in old bottles; but instead, one of the valuable things that history can teach you is that they didn't always use bottles to store wine.

Because history is an enormous component of identity and culture. This is true in a number of places, but is especially poignant in the context of Italy. If we don't care for history, we might as well drain Venice's Grand Canal in order to build a motorway, and we'll even cover it with some sort of postmodern eco-carbon-glass-walkway in order to appease the environmentalists. More realistically, without knowledge or interest history people make idiotic decisions like having a Venetian-style gondolier take tourists up and down down Milan's Navigli, completely ignoring the long history of inland navigation in Lombardy. That actually happened this summer, and in my modest opinion is insulting to both actual Venetian gondoliers who have ferried tourists around Venice for centuries, as well as the working people who as little as fifty years ago toiled shipping heavy materials up and down the Navigli. Are we just going to replace the heritage left to us by the people who built the modern city with an out-of-context tourist attraction just because the tourist trap is more recognizable? Milan is a distinct place with its own history, as is Venice, as is Florence, and anywhere else in Italy or the world that is inhabited by humans. Without respect for history, you cannot respect the identity and culture of a place and the people who live there. And if you don't respect the uniqueness of different places, their people, and their history, what is even the point? Let's tear up the Valpolicella vineyards and build soft drink bottling plants, demolish old neighborhoods in order to erect housing blocks, blast hilltops with dynamite in order to build straight roadways, and why even bother to buy local produce when we can even transcend fast food by getting all our nutrients in pill form.

If we disregard history, every place in the world might as well be the same. And if you believe that's a good thing, you disregard the value of our differences. If we don't care for history, then we don't care for the different ways we live, work, and what we make, so I suppose we really should just let the Amazon Prime robots produce and deliver all the goods and decide who gets to use them via bloodsport or something.

I'm not saying that history should be unquestioningly revered, not am I saying that no old practices, customs, or traditions should ever be revised. But what I am saying is that the reasons why we are here, the things we have been doing, and why we've been doing them are questions that we need to be constantly and continuously evaluating and considering. As it turns out, in the 1840s a Lombard entrepreneur brought over a few dozen gondolas from Venice and set up a ferry service down the Navigli. Does this historical context mean it should be acceptable to again introduce traditional Venetian boats in Lombardy? I don't think so: if all these boats will be doing is carrying tourists around, tourists should be exposed to the boats have a longer tradition in Lombardy. The Navigli are not a "discount" version of Venetian canals, they are a tangible piece of a region's hydrographic history and should be repurposed with that history in mind.

As psychology is studied to better understand the behavior of people, what drives them, what makes them tick, history helps in understanding the behavior of societies, their creations, their driving motivations, what makes us tick at a collective level, and what comes of it - whether practical (city building, art, technology), or ideological (history of ideas, religion, philosophy). There are both macro-societal, and group, or individual behaviors interlaced in this, but everything humankind has done so far points to a few general theories that can help understand where we are and how we got here.

Makes the present-day world look less confusing, too, tbh, once you gain some historical perspective. And saves one from the temptation of exceptionalism (snowflakeness :D) . Everything has happened or been done before, even if in different forms. Also helps humanity realize what are the unprecedented challenges we face today - at which point, it helps looking at how we previously dealt with unprecedented challenges. Because we have. (Doesn't mean we will succeed this time, or that we will find the same solutions viable, though.)

​

Long answer made short: in order to understand humanity.