[Bracketing, of course, the question of what the past is used for, this seems pretty in line with the "Soviet Joke" "The future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable" with which Larry Levine frames his book "The Unpredictable Past." In any case, it also reminded me of this passage from Charles Beard.]
'What, then, is this manifestation of omniscience called history? It is, as Croce says, contemporary thought about the past. History as past actuality includes, to be sure, all that has been done. said, felt, and though by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long career. History as record embraces the monuments, documents. and symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting past actuality. But it is history as thought, not as actuality, record, or specific knowledge, that is really meant when the term history is used In its widest and most general significance. It is thought about past actuality, instructed and delimited by history as record and knowledge--record and knowledge authenticated by criticism and ordered with the help of the scientific method. This is the final, positive, inescapable definition. It contains all the exactness that is possible, and all the all the bewildering problems inherent in the nature of thought and the relation of the thinker to the thing thought about.
'Although this definition of history may appear, at first glance, distressing to those who have been writing lightly about "the science of history" and "the scientific method" in historical research and construction, it is in fact in accordance with the most profound contemporary thought about history, represented by Croce, Riezler, Karl Mannheim, Mueller-Armack, and Heussi, for example. It is in keeping also with the obvious and commonplace. Has it not been said for a century or more that each historian who writes history is a product of his age, and that his work reflects the spirit of the times, of a nation, race, group, class, or section? No contemporary student of history really believes that Bossuet, Gibbon, Mommsen, or Bancroft could be duplicated to-day. Every student of history knows that his colleagues have been influenced in their selection and ordering of materiais by their biases, prejudinces, beliefs, affections, general upbringing, and experience, particularly social and economic; and if he has a sense of propriety, to say nothing of humor, he applies the canon to himself, leaving no exceptions to the rule. The pallor of waning time, if not of death, rests upon the latest volume of history, fresh from the roaring press.
'Why do we believe this to be true? The answer is that every written history--of a village, town, county, state, nation, race, group, class, idea, or the wide world--is a selection and arrangement of facts, of recorded fragments of past actuality. And the selection and arrangement of facts--a combined and complex intellectual operation--is an act of choice, conviction, and interpretation respecting values, is an act of thought. Facts, multitudinous and beyond calculation, are known, but they do not select themselves or force themselves automatically into any fixed scheme of arrangement in the mind of the historian. They are selected and ordered by him as he thinks.'
Charles A. Beard. "Written History as an Act of Faith." The American Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan., 1934) p. 219-220.