Actually a history on a state machine give’s you undo functionality a fairly common pattern, no? You have a stack of states instead of a single state. Trouble is though inter-related states isn’t it :-) things can get messy if you don’t have atomic states.

Actually someone else just pointed me in the direction of Event Sourcing - every pattern has a name somewhere - http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html