limited., a single phonetic expression (which I will analyze in detail in the following example) can actually have a number of different meanings. They can either be quite close to each other concerning their meaning or they can have completely unrelated meanings. These different shades of meaning or the completely unrelated meanings depend on the linguistic, the social and on the cultural context. The following example is simply meant to be a lead-in to the great variety of phenomena the historical development of word meaning has caused. It illustrates in how far one single sentence can be understood in different ways. Starting from here, one will understand how much word meaning has developed. p align="justify"> History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject-as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts. p align="justify"> History Helps Us Understand People and Societiesthe first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace-unless we use historical materials? 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? Some social 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. 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. 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.
History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Besecond reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened-whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congres...
