“History” is the past events and circumstances concerning people, groups, institutions, or places, etc. – anything involving human beings, their endeavours, and their societies – but also has to do with the study and analysis of these happenings†.

It is an attempt to both uncover past events in a factual way, including the discovery of hitherto unknown incidents, as well as to shed light on and to acquire some understanding of the conjunctions and origins of the episodes: the process of historical interpretation – holding a provisional model or hypothesis guiding the research and which helps the historian to assess and classify the available evidence and to present a detailed and coherent account of the subject. The facts must be respected, error and ignorance avoided in so far as is possible, and a convincing, intellectually rigourous interpretation produced.

Integral to this pursuit is the recognition that the information we now have about the human past will be incomplete, to a certain extent wrong, frequently biased, and therefore demands careful attention because of these difficulties and pitfalls.

These past events are glimpsed through sources such as testimony from living witnesses (oral histories); letters, memoirs, photographs and films; legal and financial records of courts, legislatures, religious institutions, or businesses; and from the physical remains of past civilizations, such as architecture, arts and crafts, burial grounds, and so forth – amongst many other sources of information which provide the evidence from which historians piece together the events of the past.