How do I recreate my purchases history in iTunes?

Question

I was recently having issues with iTunes crashing on a regular basis and decided to delete the iTunes preferences AND recreate a new iTunes library by reimporting all my purchases and other media contained on my hard drive. But, in doing so my purchase history in the iTunes sidebar is no longer present - as are a few other playlists. I'm not too concerned about the playlists, but would like to restore the history of my iTunes purchases.
I know that I can go into my iTunes account and view EVERYTHING from the very first time I bought an iTunes song, movie, app, etc., but I'd like to have the chronological listing in iTunes itself (not the store). I've looked just about everywhere to find a way to do this but cannot find it. There's lots of info on restoring the actual purchases, but nothing on recreating the history list.
Anyone familiar on how this can be accomplished? I would think that Apple having the list of purchases on their servers would simply allow one to download the history easily into iTunes. Help!!!
Dan

Answer 1

Thanks for your suggestion, but...
Only problem with your methodology is that is precisely what I'm trying to avoid, i.e. a corrupted file. My general feeling is that this is why iTunes was crashing/freezing. At this point it's been stable. Only time will tell if this truly was the fix.
Perhaps I'll put in a request to Apple to allow users to rebuild their purchase history via the account history. Should be nothing more than Apple providing a "link" to their database OR more securely, a file generated by their system that is then transparently imported.