'Historic' Versus 'Historical'

The Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, just announced that Kamala Harris is his pick for vice president, and she is the first of many things. Her father immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica, and her mother immigrated from India, so she is both the first Black woman to be on a major presidential ticket and the first person of Indian descent. 

And here’s a piece of trivia that surprised me: According to the website FiveThiryEight, she is also the first person from west of the Rockies to ever be on the ticket for the Democratic Party—as president or vice president. Republicans, by contrast, have nominated eight people from the West, but not the Democrats.

So with all those firsts, do we call her selection “historic” or “historical”?

'Historic'

“Historic” is the word you want to use to describe an item or event that’s important or influential in history, so the right way to say it is that Kamala’s selection is historic. It’s definitely an important milestone in our history with all those firsts.

Other examples of historic things include 

• Historic documents like the Magna Carta
• Historic ruins like the Roman Forum
• Historic battlefields like the Gettysburg Battlefield
• Historic artifacts like the Rosetta Stone

All of these are important or famous things from the past.

'Historical'

“Historical,” on the other hand, is the word you can use to describe anything from the past, important or not. A “historical event” is just something that happened in the past. It doesn’t have to be an event that people are going to talk about and remember as important 50 years from now. For example, Rutherford B. Hayes choosing William Wheeler as his vice president is a historical event because it happened a long time ago in 1876, but as far as I know, it wasn’t historic. History buffs may set me straight, but as far as I know, nobody today talks about the groundbreaking achievements or glass-shattering importance of Wheeler’s vice presidency.

And just as an interesting aside, while I was looking for an especially unremarkable vice president to use as an example, I read about a lot of vice presidents and came across Charles Curtis, who was Herbert Hoover’s vice president starting in 1928. He was the first and only person enrolled in a Native American tribe to ever serve as vice president of the United States.

His mother was 1/4 Kaw Indian,...

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