For History to exist, there must be not only a given reality, but also a negation of that reality and at the same time a ("sublimated") preservation of what has been negated. For only then is evolution creative; only then do a true continuity and a real progress exist in it. And this is precisely what distinguishes human History from a simple biological or "natural" evolution. Now, to preserv oneself as negated is to remember what one has been even while one is becoming radically other. It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, or, better, as dialectical entity. Hence history is always a conscious and willed tradition, and all real history also manifests itself as a historiography: there is no History without conscious, lived historical memory.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 232