This paper discusses the contributions history can make to educational administration and how history needs to be conceptualised as a humanities discipline to serve this purpose, including two aspects of the field of particular relevance to educational administration and leadership, biography and comparative studies. The value of history is presented in its interpretive power, in both investigating the particular through individual cases and how these are related to larger societal forces of change producing explanation, establishing causal relations, and achieving understanding as "Verstehen" in its full hermeneutic sense. (Contains 57 notes.)