I know this question is old, but as of today (Django 1.9), Django's history items are more robust than they were at the date of this question. In a current project, I needed to get the recent history items and put them into a dropdown from the navbar. This is how I did it and was very straight forward:
*views.py*
from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry, ADDITION, CHANGE, DELETION
def main(request, template):
logs = LogEntry.objects.exclude(change_message="No fields changed.").order_by('-action_time')[:20]
logCount = LogEntry.objects.exclude(change_message="No fields changed.").order_by('-action_time')[:20].count()
return render(request, template, {"logs":logs, "logCount":logCount})
As seen in the above code snippet, I'm creating a basic queryset from the LogEntry model (django.contrib.admin.models.py is where it's located in django 1.9) and excluding the items where no changes are involved, ordering it by the action time and only showing the past 20 logs. I'm also getting another item with just the count. If you look at the LogEntry model, you can see the field names that Django has used in order to pull back the pieces of data that you need. For my specific case, here is what I used in my template:
Link to Image Of Final Product
*template.html*
<ul class="dropdown-menu">
<li class="external">
<h3><span class="bold">{{ logCount }}</span> Notification(s) </h3>
<a href="{% url 'index' %}"> View All </a>
</li>
{% if logs %}
<ul class="dropdown-menu-list scroller actionlist" data-handle-color="#637283" style="height: 250px;">
{% for log in logs %}
<li>
<a href="javascript:;">
<span class="time">{{ log.action_time|date:"m/d/Y - g:ia" }} </span>
<span class="details">
{% if log.action_flag == 1 %}
<span class="label label-sm label-icon label-success">
<i class="fa fa-plus"></i>
</span>
{% elif log.action_flag == 2 %}
<span class="label label-sm label-icon label-info">
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i>
</span>
{% elif log.action_flag == 3 %}
<span class="label label-sm label-icon label-danger">
<i class="fa fa-minus"></i>
</span>
{% endif %}
{{ log.content_type|capfirst }}: {{ log }}
</span>
</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% else %}
<p>{% trans "This object doesn't have a change history. It probably wasn't added via this admin site." %}</p>
{% endif %}
</li>
</ul>