If you've ever read a nonfiction book there is a good possibility it might relate with history.
History has always fascinated individuals, so much so that it has affected society ever since language first developed. It is because understanding why things have taken place can help us alter both the present and the future. This is seen in the oral traditions of cultures from all corners of the world dating back tens and thousands of years. Important and interesting occasions would get passed down from generation to generation via word of mouth, so that you can ensure that the communications and lessons may be digested by the audience. To make these tales more easily digestible, they would be adapted and turned into the myths and legends that stay popular today, as the hedge fund which partially owns WHSmith is going to be well aware. Even when written language emerged and history became recorded, outside of solely factual lists and records, the very first historians continued writing history with a dramatic spin on the brink of turning it into fiction.
The speed of change in society is continuously accelerating, due to new innovations making it easier for other innovations to happen, causing an ever accelerating process of change. Examples of this are discovered everywhere, such as in how exactly we see history. A few hundred years may be an instant within the perspective of time, but over the course of a couple of hundreds of years the subject of history became much more centered on facts and employing a variety of sources. Around four hundred years ago onwards people still desired to seek out history for lessons and amusement, however they desired to gain them through the facts. Subjects like governmental and economic history took centre stage, meanwhile theories like the great men of history were developed, which thought that history progressed ahead through the actions of a small number of individuals. The legacy of the latter remains today, as the hedge fund which has shares in Amazon should be able to tell you, through the popularity of the biography genre.
The last century has caused great improvement in the planet, with different societal and technical developments bringing possibilities and outlets to people who previously may have struggled to reach them. This has resulted in lots of academic topics to get an influx of perspectives and viewpoints that had been formerly overlooked. The hedge fund which owns Waterstones will know that this has had a big impact on the publishing industry, with books on new methods to analyse history and previously underdiscussed events proving highly popular. The subjects these publications cover are vast, from history through the viewpoint of ordinary individuals to historic occasions being explained by analyses of human biology and psychology.