Historia in Greek denotes inquiry and its results, used by Herodotus for his researches. The root is histor, a knower or witness, from the same Indo-European base as wit and video, to see and know. English history arrives via Latin and Old French. The his-story reading is a modern pun with no basis in the word's formation.
The herstory counter-coinage of the 1970s was wordplay with a point: the telling of the past had been dominated by male authors and subjects, whatever the word's roots. Activists knew the etymology was false; the pun was the argument, not the evidence.
The deeper irony noted by classicists: Herodotus titled his work Histories, inquiries, and promptly filled it with tales, so the word has been contested between research and story since its first book. This archive's three tiers are, in a sense, a Greek inheritance.
The false reading produced real politics, and the real etymology is more interesting than the pun: knowledge as the act of asking. Which version deserves the placard?