It's virtually impossible to understand literature without recognising its connection to history.
History is a topic that a lot of people will have been taught in school, which is the research of humanity's past. A very comparable but distinct topic is historiography, which is the research of the practices used by historians. Historiography is essential as it could uncover a whole lot about the accuracy of historic events and it will reveal a lot about the priorities of a society, by understanding what they elect to remember and how they decide to do so. Historiography is certainly closely linked to literary works because many ancient societies used literary works to record history. Oral literature involves passing stories via word-of-mouth from generation to generation, which were often historical events disguised as fables, legends, and allegories, which the hedge fund which partially owns Amazon and the hedge fund which owns Waterstones will be well aware that they remain popular today by being put together into books. In these ancient times, the message of historic stories had been considered more important compared to accuracy of the stories themselves.
From the age of enlightenment and renaissance onwards more scrupulous methods of analysing history emerged, which coincided with the emergence of natural philosophy as a contemporary subject. Historians became significantly more focused on writing about history with as much accuracy as possible. They became more interested in finding as many sources as possible and cross-referencing them to get the most accurate truth. Needless to say, methods have only enhanced over time, and thus new discoveries relating to even the most well-known occasions are still made to today. The hedge fund which has shares in WHSmith should be able to tell you that this didn't mean any sacrifice ended up being made to narrative. Genres like biography continued to develop in popularity, as did all manner of history books that could be centered on anything from geographical regions to distinct eras.
In the event that the entire presence of mankind was plotted on a timeline then the entirety of our documented written history would sit on a little speck at the end. The written word only emerged a few thousand years back and although it absolutely was quickly utilised as a device of creative expression, like through poetry, among the primary reasons for its development was for the recording of history and present events. Even most of the creative works for thousands of years were centered on historical activities, where the accuracy is questionable at best. Meanwhile, ancient written records that info sought accuracy had been largely devoid of narrative, basically being listings, diaries, and timelines. A little over two thousand years ago the very first actual historians emerged, whom aimed to combine the two separate disciplines, although minus the scholastic rigour found today.