Memory is an essential part of our social existence. Our culture is rooted in shared experience. Each one of us possesses a very immediate need for history, for to make sense of our own lives we need to develop a sense of understanding of our own past and the larger human experience. All human activities in this sense are historical in character. And in this way, we all must be historians, although we may never reach beyond a very amateurish understanding of the discipline we all use to make sense of our lives and surroundings.
Professional historians devote their lives to making the past help to explain the present.
As a discipline, history depends upon a host of supporting scholarly fields, from archaeology, epigraphy, forensic medicine, geography, iconography, numismatics, philately, political science, psychology, sociology, and many, many others. Everything that exists in the present has a past, and everything in the present carries a part of that past with it. History is a part of the answer to every question we may ask. The problem is to learn how to use the past to help us understand the present and the future. Sources of that past are all around us, not just in archives and museums, but in our own minds and those of others around us.