``History'' is a general concept, intended in the sense of ``train of events connected with a person or thing''.
In the realm of temporal databases, the concept of history is intended to include multiple time dimensions as well as the data models (+R1). Thus we can have valid-time histories, transaction-time histories, bitemporal histories, user-defined time histories, etc. However, multi-dimensional histories can be defined from mono-dimensional ones (e.g. a bitemporal history can be seen as the transaction-time history of a valid-time history).
Formally or informally, the term ``history'' has been often used in many temporal database papers (+R4), also to explain other terms. For instance, salary history, object history, transaction history are all expressions used in this respect.