What Is History?

Do you know where you were born? Were you born at a hospital, or at home? How much did you weigh when you were born? What did you have to eat for your first birthday?

You don’t remember being born, do you? And you probably don’t remember your first birthday party! So how can you find the answers to these questions?

You can ask your parents.

These stories are your “history.” Your history is the story of what happened to you from the moment you were born, all the way up to the present. You can learn this history by listening to your parents. They remember what happened when you were born. And they probably took pictures of you when you were a baby. You can learn even more about your history from these pictures. Did you have hair? Were you fat or thin? Are you smiling or frowning? What are you wearing? Do you remember those clothes?

You have a history—and so do your parents. Where were they born? Were they born at home, or at a hospital? Where did they go to school? What did they like to eat? Who were their best friends? How can you find the answers to these questions? You can ask your parents. And if they don’t remember, you can ask their parents—your grandparents.

Now let’s ask a harder question. Your grandmother was once a little girl. What is her history like? How much did she weigh when she was born? Did she cry a lot? When did she cut her first tooth? What was her favorite thing to eat?

You would have to ask her mother—your great-grandmother. And you could look at baby pictures of your grandmother. But what if you can’t talk to your great-grandmother, and what if you don’t have any baby pictures of your grandmother? Is there another way you could find out about your grandmother’s history?

There might be.

Now, suppose you find this letter, years later. Even though you can’t talk to your great-grandmother, you can learn the history of your grandmother from her letter. You could also learn history if your great-grandmother kept a diary or a journal, where she wrote about things that happened to her long ago.

In this book, we’re going to learn about the history of people who lived a long time ago, in all different countries around the world. We’re going to learn about the stories they told, the battles they fought, and the way they lived—even what they ate and drank, and what they wore.

How do we know these things about people who lived many, many years in the past? After all, we can’t ask them.

We learn about the history of long-ago people in two different ways. The first way is through the letters, journals, and other written records that they left behind. Suppose a woman who lived in ancient times wrote a letter to a friend who lived in another village. She might say, “There hasn’t been very much rain here recently! All our crops are dying. The wheat is especially bad. If it doesn’t rain soon, we’ll have to move to another village!”

Hundreds of years later, we find this letter. What can we learn about the history of ancient times from this letter? We can learn that people in ancient times grew wheat for food. They depended on rain to keep the wheat healthy. And if it didn’t rain enough, they moved somewhere else.

Other kinds of written records tell us about what kings and armies did in ancient times. When a king won a great victory, he often ordered a monument built. On the monument, he would have the story of his victory engraved in stone letters. Or a king might order someone in his court to write down the story of his reign, so that everyone would know what an important and powerful king he was. Thousands of years later, we can read the stone letters or the stories and learn more about the king.

People who read letters, journals, other documents, and monuments to find out what happened in the past are called historians. And the story they write about the past is called history.