These words denote a systematic record of past events. A history is a narrative that recounts events with attention to their importance, their mutual relations, causes and consequences; it is therefore highly selective: Herodotus’s famous history of the Persian wars; to commission an author to write a history of a company. A chronicle is a record of events in order of time; annals are similar but are divided year by year. Neither chronicles nor annals attempt to interpret events. A historian, for instance, might scan the annals of a political party before writing a history of its creation and growth; a magazine article might include a chronicle of the major political events of the last fifty years.