Your first step in thinking through this is to understand that the word "relevant" is a relational term. In other words, nothing can be "relevant" in some absolute sense, but only "relevant to something". Furthermore, everything from one second to fifteen billion years ago is "historical" in the sense that it is past. Thus the only possible object of knowledge is history in the sense that the present vanishes too quickly to be studied (immediately...
Your first step in thinking through this is to understand that the word "relevant" is a relational term. In other words, nothing can be "relevant" in some absolute sense, but only "relevant to something". Furthermore, everything from one second to fifteen billion years ago is "historical" in the sense that it is past. Thus the only possible object of knowledge is history in the sense that the present vanishes too quickly to be studied (immediately becoming the past) and the future hasn't yet happened.
In almost any area of human endeavor, the more we know of the past, the more we can understand how and why things happen. On the most trivial personal level, you might understand a friend's dislike of dogs by knowing that he had been attacked by a dog as a child. On a broader political level, many of the current conflicts in the Middle East stem back to the split between Shia and Sunni Islam and the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. The broader and deeper your knowledge of the past, the better you will understand the present.
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