"trace a history" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe the process of researching and examining a timeline of past events or information. For example, "The professor asked the students to trace a history of the social movements of the last century."
Lebed's military career traces a history of Soviet adventure and disaster.
His opinion, tracing a history of segregation, prompted the district to adopt an integration plan.
Beginning in the 1940's with examples by W.P.A. Federal Art Project alumni, it traces a history of Abstract Expressionist graphic art through the 1970's.
Downstairs, Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars supplies the early instalments of a nine-part epic tracing a history of African American lives.
On a stage that slowly becomes encircled with maps, photographs and marriage certificates, Millican-Slater traces a history of early deaths, orphanages and suffragette protest, creating a capsule of Edwardian London.
Elsewhere, Greene, a professor of women's studies and literature at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., traces a history of professional slights and nonrecognition, and seeks to build a case that Stewart is like Galileo and Copernicus, recognized only in hindsight.
The objects are among those detailed in a new guide to be launched this month by the British Museum, tracing a history often hidden within one of the world's great collections.
Primarily an account of the career of his father, William Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 1976, it traces a history ending in 1996, when his body washed ashore eight days after he embarked on a late-afternoon solo canoe outing in Maryland.
This article traces a history of disgust from the moment the word is first attested in English.
Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter.
