The problem TOK students have with history is that think they know what history is. The past and the record of the past are not the same thing. Everything that happened still happened; only some accounts of it were written down, and only some of what was written down survived.   Every person who lived before writing left no written trace. The further back you go, the thinner the record becomes. The decisions about what to keep and what to discard were made by people with reasons of their own. History is an inquiry into what can be recovered from what survived, knowing that survival itself was not random. The discipline of History is the professional historian's attempts to make sense of the past, through the traces of what the past left behind. They write words on a page that can be justifed by those traces, but the knowledge itself is built by those justifications which are often contested.

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The four pages of this theme follow these problems across the TOK framework: what counts as historical knowledge and where its limits are, whose perspectives have shaped the record, how historians construct and justify claims, and what ethical obligations follow from writing about people who cannot respond.