“If you know your historyThen you would know where you coming fromThen you wouldn’t have to ask meWho the heck do I think I am”– Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier”Dear reader,Does the past matter? Why do we need to know history?The answer is pretty simple. History is memory. Like memory, history gives us identity; it completes us. History is not just a static record of bygone eras, but rather a living entity that helps build our identities, moral frameworks, and sense of belonging.At its core, the study of history seeks to answer existential questions. How did we arrive at our place in the world? What legacies—of culture, ideas, and toils—did we inherit? In Why History Matters, Gerda Lerner (who calls all humans “practicing historians”) shows us how history defines human identity, pointing out that people who lack knowledge of their collective past often have a rootless sense of self.Still, understanding history is no small feat. It involves interpretation and perspective. It includes the realisation that the stories we inherit often carry biases. Historians sift through diaries, letters, decrees, and relics of daily life. They try to separate legend from reality, rumour from fact. This interpretive process often sets off philosophical debates. Can we ever recover an “objective” truth about the past? Or is history an ongoing conversation shaped by the historian’s own context?In his seminal and beautiful work What Is History?, E.H. Carr calls history “an unending dialogue between the present and the past”. He challenges the idea of absolute objectivity and notes that historians inevitably filter events through contemporary lenses. Richard J. Evans, writing in In Defence of History, argues that real facts—documents, bones, traces of existence—do anchor us, even though interpretations may vary. This tension between certainty and relativism makes historical inquiry a balancing act, that demands both intellectual rigour and humility.There is also an emotional pull to studying history. Far from being a cold, clinical pursuit, learning about human triumphs, tragedies, and everyday life demands empathy. Through time, people have loved, lost, fought, created art, and built civilisations. Their stories connect and disturb new readers.But there are risks too. In authoritarian regimes, researching or teaching censored history can lead to imprisonment, torture, or worse. Uncovering hidden facts becomes dangerous when it threatens powerful interests. History, thus, is not just an academic pursuit; in certain contexts, it is a battleground.We know how history can be wielded as propaganda to sway collective memories and legitimise or vilify specific groups (minorities, women, etc.). Governments may delete or rewrite entire chapters of the past to maintain power or craft a unifying myth. Activists, by contrast, might recover lost histories to support the claims of marginalised communities. In each instance, the fight over historical interpretation becomes a fight for identity, memory, and moral legitimacy.In The Past Is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal says that while the past is intimately linked to us, it also remains foreign. It was moulded by norms and conditions far different from our own. Recognising this duality fosters empathy for historical actors while reminding us not to impose our own moral frameworks on them. This thought keeps popping up whenever I watch historical dramas and follow the controversies around them, the most recent being the row around the Vicky Kaushal-starrer Chhaava, a film based on the life of Sambhaji Maharaj.Above all, dear reader, history offers meaning. And in our accelerating world, it links us to a lineage of human endeavours, bridging who we were, who we are, and who we might become.That said, history writing faces a formidable challenge today. In an era when almost every facet of life is catalogued, digitised, and circulated at breakneck speed, the notion of history has undergone enormous change. The past once depended on physical archives and painstaking paper trails. Now we have a deluge of data that can quickly become unmanageable. Add artificial intelligence, and it can hallucinate and generate fictitious historical images, dialogues, and entire narratives with ease. In this era, our grasp of fact, memory, and myth grows ever more complex.The first major challenge is the sheer volume of information available now. Historians once bemoaned scarce sources; today they face an overwhelming abundance. Email threads, social media posts, website archives, and digitised government records form an ocean of digital traces. In History in the Digital Age, Toni Weller argues that historians now stand at a crossroads, where they must adopt new methodologies or risk being swamped. Data science techniques, such as distant reading, text mining, use of Big Data tools, and database queries, show that patterns in archives are too vast today for manual processing.Yet digital sources pose a strange, for want of a better word, “paradox”. Despite their abundance, they are ephemeral. Servers fail, hyperlinks rot, content vanishes, or is altered without warning. This raises questions about how future historians will reconstruct early 21st-century events. If entire datasets or social media platforms disappear with no offline backup, parts of our cultural heritage may evaporate. This generation must strive to develop reliable systems for preserving websites, digital publications, and blink-and-miss social media posts.The second danger is doctored data. Photoshop, video editing, and deepfake technology make image and audio manipulation nearly undetectable, even to experts. A manipulated photo can swiftly become accepted as “proof” of an event that never occurred. And once embedded in public consciousness, such misinformation becomes difficult to correct, especially given “confirmation biases”.Of all digital innovations, AI has the most alarming implications for our conception of the past. Large language models can produce accounts that resemble historical accounts yet mix fact and fiction. Imagine a future researcher sifting through digital archives and encountering AI-generated “news articles”—how would he find where truth ends and where fabrication begins.All of this can also be read as democratising historical discourse and offering opportunities for greater inclusivity and transparency. Citizen historians or amateur archivists can now upload evidence that challenges official narratives instantly. But the free-for-all environment also invites sabotage and misinformation.How do we respond? We adapt. The digital era compels us to cultivate new critical awareness. We need to have more urgent conversations around the ethical guidelines that should power the study of history in the digital era. In doing so, we keep history grounded in careful source evaluation.Frontline’s latest edition, as you might have guessed, digs deep into history. Two brilliant scholars, Sharada Srinivasan and David Killick, examine Tamil Nadu’s recent claim of heralding the Iron Age—the hows, whys, and why-nots. The issue also has an in-depth interview with Thangam Thennarasu, the Tamil Nadu Minister who is overseeing the State’s archaeological mission.Read the articles and tell us how you think history should be written. Or rewritten.Wishing you a great week ahead,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor, FrontlineWe hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS