This article discusses the reasons that led the discipline of history to take an interest in the study of the past in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially due to the demands made by the then prevailing type of modernity, which was articulated around the idea of the nation. In our historic present, the world has entered a new modern constellation, world modernity, a particularity of which is an increased importance of our contemporary period. This radical transformation should give rise to profound changes in the understanding of history as a field of knowledge, and especially the importance it ascribes in the present.