Most historians, centered in cities, have treated nomads as barbaric and marginal peoples. Varying schemes of periodization lead to widely different interpretations of the past. The same facts of a battle may look different to a warrior on the field, to an observing child of that warrior, to a historian celebrating the victory a century later, and to a historian in still later times, after the victory had been reversed. William McNeill took this as the title of his first broad interpretation of world history. Society' is also used to refer to empires, nations, and ethnic groups both large and small.
Historians often tend to assume that societies are bounded and homogeneous.
But there have been many people who could be considered as members of more than one society, and the differences and conflicts within societies have usually been significant. Historians use the term to refer to a wide range of cultural mixtures. States include monarchies, republics, empires, etc. Many people have lived without states, in societies organized by lineage or other social grouping, and the lives of people within states have included far more than the story of government. Cultural, social, environmental and health histories, for instance, depend only partly on the state.