There is a present time-frame in which humanity currently resides—the here and now—consisting of the days, hours, minutes, and seconds in which men, women, and children wake in the morning and go to sleep at night. There is also a future time-frame, which exists hopefully in the minds of those same people who live in the present but look forward to awakening to another day, a better day than they had the day before.
This “day-before” is the inevitable past time-frame that becomes immutable history after a single micro-millisecond of an event in the present elapses. This past, present, and future form the combined continuum of the clock of human history, which has been symbolically ticking ever since the advent of the first sundial or hourglass.
For example, an ancient Sumerian artisan might have woken alone one morning six thousand years ago and begun the arduous process of crafting a pot from which to drink water. He, or she, began making the pot one moment in the present and finished it hours later.
The true history of the events that occurred in the making of that pot began and ended the moment the person commenced and finally finished the work. The only true and exact historical record of the making of that pot could have come only from the ancient Sumerian worker who crafted it. Only such a true record of the past could reveal who made that pot—whether a man or woman—and how it was made, if perchance it were discovered and excavated by an anthropologist six thousand years later.
Actually, during any epoch of human history, the amount of time separating the doing or commission of a human act from a later public knowledge and accurate, truthful description of it is not half as important as the veracity of the diligent, honest historians bringing it to public light. Regardless of the amount of time that has gone by, past events remain largely conjecture and mystery until the bulk of proper research is done to ferret out the factual truth.
Whether one hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years have elapsed since an event happened, the people who witnessed it may have written letters to their literate friends and associates about the facts that actually occurred during the event. These documents would constitute what are called primary historical records.
Journalists’ articles in books, newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals written about the event at the time of its happening, and mainly during the first two decades directly following it, are regarded as secondary historical records. These historical records are found in library archives called the stacks and on microfilm.
