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History is the recounting of temporal otherness - awareness of, and stories about, times which are DIFFERENT from one's own - much as anthropology is the recounting of cultural otherness. Thinking in "hundred-year-old terms" might be a valid way of getting OUTSIDE the categories of the present, the propensity to think in neoliberal/cybernetic terms. Though, I say this without much sympathy for the specific hundred-year-old terms which (left-)anarchists tend to use.

Some dangers in writing/reading history: history can never be complete, there's a lot about the past that isn't recorded, and none of the accounts are exact (think of how a report on a battle or a demonstration won't list all the individuals involved or even the ants walking across the route); historians always depend on particular sources, which are usually partial and biased; historians read history through particular, present categories and desires, and this can make contact with otherness difficult; there's a tendency for winners to write the history because they write either the sources or the history books; and real past events are fragmented and multiple (like present events), history as a "science" is tied-up with nation-building and false homogenisation. None of this is a reason not to "do" history since something similar applies to all knowledge. It just means "be careful", "don't be too certain" and "add nuance". Deleuze says we should write nomadologies instead of histories, and nomad sciences instead of royal sciences... I think that's good advice, so long as we avoid slipping into the pomo trap of only telling small stories within small horizons. Anarchist history is epic nomadology.

I can see quite a few important uses for history in the practice of anarchy.

1. reminding people that statism is a temporary blip it that it has been breached/overthrown before. Examples: histories of stateless societies and liberated zones.

2. strategic learning: what "worked" in past societies/movements, what failed, and why (bearing in mind these conditions may or may not still apply). Example: James Scott's work on the arts of resistance, or the way Gelderloos talks about strategic learning in social movements.

3. using history to validate anarchist claims about the state, capitalism, etc, and/or

4. using history to rebut particular claims by political opponents. It's not self-evident that capitalism plunders poor countries, police exist to enforce dominance and not to protect the public, etc... it takes historical knowledge to "prove" these claims. Ditto with lower-level claims - Prohibition failed, abortion laws lead to underground abortions and deaths, the Civil Rights Movement only "won" because it had a militant as well as a pacifist wing... there's a whole load of liberal, rightist, Stalinist etc myths which can only be dealt with historically.

5. emotional effects - generating hope or rage, making us feel less alone and demoralised, creating powerful symbolic reference-points for fantasies, etc. I think this is the role of Hakim Bey's historical work, and of things like the Robin Hood myths.

Anarchists use all of these - but also tell other kinds of historical stories which I find more worrying. The idea of continual upward progress (even if with blips - as in Bakunin's argument) is emotionally powerful but empirically false and politically dangerous. The reverse story of continual decline is more realistic but potentially debilitating. I prefer to tell stories where history is a battle, or shifting relationship, among different forces, with strategic and tactical balances of forces at different points. Hence my affinity for things like Kondratiev wave theory and Kropotkin/Ward's social/political principles.

There's dangers of history but there's also dangers of ahistoricity. The idea that a present oppressive reality is natural and timeless, rather than a social/historical construct, is useful for power. The establishment seems to go out of its way to encourage forgetting of particular histories - to the point where I'll periodically find out about some major event within or just before my lfietime, that I've never heard of before. There's a misleading impression that there's no social struggle or repression in western countries, which arises more from what people DON'T know than what they do. In the current phase of capitalism, the elite also prefer ahistorical types of analysis in areas like economics and sociology - as if people can be discussed without historical or cultural context, as feedback machines. Talking about global wealth inequalities without histories of colonialism and core-periphery relations for example. Or individuals as always-already economically rational actors, strategic players, self-branders and so on. In these cases, historicisation is tied-up with denaturalisation.

So yeah. TL;DR: tell epic nomadologies, tell strategic stories rather than up-down progress-regress stories, historicise things that are naturalised, use history to access temporal otherness, but also remember that sources are partial and biased.