People live in the present.This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior-a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion.Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings.How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past?scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior.But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act.Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments.But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful

about why to bother need to know what the purpose is Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals.In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine.Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization-a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline.Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts.They plan for and worry about the future.