This article describes how to see old conversations without having to go to the conversation history.

If you want to view previous messages from a contact you are having a conversation with, you can click Show Recent Messages at the top of the conversation window, or use the F3 button on your keyboard. After loading the first batch of recent messages, to keep loading additional messages you can click Show More Messages or use F4 on your keyboard.

After you load the first batch of messages, if you hit F3 again, this is will hide the messages that were just loaded.

NOTE: If you do not have 50 messages from previous conversations the option to load more messages will disappear when all of the messages have been loaded.