Ideally what you want is a "useful" history, not an actual one. And by "useful" I mean one where the changes in each commit are related to a specific, self-contained update (feature addition, bug fix, etc.).

That way you can branch at any point in the commit history and be sure it'll run cleanly or cherry-pick a change without having to remember everything that it might depend on. And you get exactly what you want and nothing more.