why history?

Karl Marx noted that:

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crises do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.

which seems quite apt. I've been thinking a lot lately about distinctions between disciplines and my motivation for choosing to pursue my studies in history when my interests rum the gamut of the humanities, from anthropology to sociology.

Marx's insight seemingly encapsulates the essence of the importance of studying history, and is certainly more eloquently stated than the plain fact of the matter: history matters to us all and inevitably influences the making of tomorrow's history.