I find that history is best viewed as a phenomenon of consciousness—the mind's awareness of itself. With awareness of oneself comes awareness of the eventuality

I find that history is best viewed as a phenomenon of consciousness—the mind's awareness of itself. With awareness of oneself comes awareness of the eventuality of death, the discovery of the "future" and its opposite, the past. In this sense history is a discovery of conscious beings of which humans are the most advanced by probably orders of magnitude (which is a difficult thing to quantify to say the least). It's not so much that history is "about" humans; it only really applies to humans in the first place. To have a history of "elephants" is just to have a history of elephants as understood by humans—unless it's elephants that are communicating it. The best explanations I've heard of this concept are in Jordan Peterson's Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series, available on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I.... His book Maps of Meaning is also fantastic: https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Peterson/dp/0415922224 https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Pete...