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Called simply Bronze, it celebrates a metal so important it has its own age of history attached to it, and so responsive to the artist's skill that it breathes life into gods, humans, mythological creatures and animals with equal success.

It is remarkable to think that had Bronze been mounted say 15 years ago, the portrait of the past that it delivered would have been subtly different. History is very far from a done deal.

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’

But hold on a minute.

If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?

That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.

Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.

As the Technology Review reported:A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.

So it seems that social media sites like Twitter do not remain as fecund a resource over time as they do in real time. But no historian has ever worked on the assumption that all, or even most, information about an event is preserved, let alone even recorded. Not even Twitter has changed that.

Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, has bemoaned Britain’s narrow view of its own history, calling it “dangerous and regrettable” for focusing almost exclusively on the “sunny side”. Speaking before the Berlin opening of his highly popular exhibition Germany – Memories of a Nation, MacGregor expressed his admiration for Germany’s rigorous appraisal of its history which he said could not be more different to that of Britain. “In Britain we use our history in order to comfort us to make us feel stronger, to remind ourselves that we were always, always deep down, good people,” he said. “Maybe we mention a little bit of slave trade here and there, a few wars here and there, but the chapters we insist on are the sunny ones,” he said.

E. H. Carr in 1961 delivered a series of six lectures at Cambridge University examining the question “What is history?”

Victors are said to write history. But in California, history is being written by a committee that is at the center of a raging debate over how to tell the story of South Asia as it tries to update textbooks and revise curriculums for Grades 6 and 7.The dispute centers on whether the region that includes modern-day India, Pakistan and Nepal should be referred to as India or as South Asia, to represent the plurality of cultures there — particularly because India was not a nation-state until 1947. It also touches on how the culture of the region is portrayed, including women’s role in society and the vestiges of the caste system.

"Ignoring our history doesn’t make it go away. It always ends up bubbling back up to the top at some point," Allen said. "It may be squished down for a while but it will always come up in different ways."

This  move prompted new academic programs at the university and, according to at least one advocate, served as a tipping point in the national trend toward confronting shameful pasts.

The administration of President Park Geun-hye also knows that history is a powerful tool for molding young minds. That is why, after weeks of rancorous public debate, on Nov. 3 it made official its decision to replace current middle and high school history textbooks produced by private publishers with government-issued ones by 2017. The announcement was condemned by many scholars and the political opposition.

The idea that youth is wasted on the young? Wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the creators of Superman were all under 30 when they wrote themselves into history. In this inspirational TEDYouth 2011 Talk, Brad Meltzer encourages us to dream big, work hard, and stay humble.

Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly.

But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history.

South Korea's new president says he is scrapping government-authored history textbooks ordered by his predecessor. They symbolised "outdated and one-sided" history education, an aide said. The conservative government of Park Geun-hye said the books were needed to correct left-wing bias. The move caused anger and most schools refused them.

I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalizations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the exis­tence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that, despite the uncontrollability of human behavior, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control; you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evi­dence, the qualitative narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.