Historians, as keepers of memory, address deep-seated human fears of forgetting and being forgotten, even as the discipline of History equips us to get to know the world around us in greater depth by observing people and phenomena over time, rather than only at any given moment. History allows us to explore and discover worlds that are very different to our own. It allows us to travel into the past, and like all other forms of travel, adds to and broadens our lives through encounters with the new and the unfamiliar, the surprising and the shocking, keeping alive within us the precious sense of wonder.
The discipline of History never stops to amaze because it ceaselessly probes, with ever greater complexity, how and the reasons why everything around us, everything that we take for granted and think of as being natural about human lives and the wider natural world, came into being. The study of History, by teasing us into looking at everything as being in a state of change and constant flux, as being historical rather than natural can unfreeze the world for us and introduce a sense of fluidity in our own lives.
