How the study of history help us change?

Knowing the past helps us understand what we're capable of. If we just discovered an ancient Mayan artifact that was more advanced than we are now then we would love to know how on Earth they figured out how to do that. The past helps us prevent things from happening in the future. Take The Civil War. Because we know what caused that horrible war we could prevent another like it in the future. Also, the past helps us understand how things work. If someone has already discovered a vaccine for cancer, then we would want to know the process of how they created it so we could do it, too. Do you understand now?