There is an object related to matters called History (Histories) that is NOT the history of the matter object.

The History object was created before the Salesforce platform supported the creation of custom objects. The idea was to have a place to put the generic history of a matter.  The idea was you would create different record types for the different kinds of history records you wanted to record against a matter. For example medical history, litigation histories, insurance histories, personal injury accounts, insurance claim history, etc.  As you can imagine, once custom objects were introduced, there was no need for the history object.