If the messenger failed to deliver it because his horse lost a shoe, the historian wants to know whythe shoe was lost. A recent, new method of analyzing the past is called counter-factual history. An example of this method is to evaluate the importance of the railroads by estimating what the impact of their absence would have had on the nation's economic growth and development. Many people think history is irrelevant to everyday life. This may be because the history courses they took involved remembering names, dates, places, and events, rather than how and why things happened.
Most people are intelligent enough to learn from their own experiences.
It is not intelligent to also learn from other people's experiences. The study of history is the study of the other people's experiences. Just as what you are is the result of what happened to you and what you did in the past, what our society is like today is the result of its past. You cannot really understand a person, a society, or an econmy without a knowledge of their past. The job of a historian is to find regularities in the sequence of past events so that he or for insights useful to us today in making decisions, making policy, and forecasting the future.