But i couldn't able to sort the date in descending order.

Two easy options:

• You could just reverse your comparison yourself, using secondDate.compareTo(firstDate). (I assume that in your real code you're actually returning retVal; it's ignored in your posted code.)
• Call Collections.reverseOrder(Comparator) to create a comparator with the reverse order of the original one.

You can use Comparator.reverseOrder() to have a comparator giving the reverse of the natural ordering.

If you want to reverse the ordering of an existing comparator, you can use Comparator.reversed().

Sample code:

Stream.of(1, 4, 2, 5)
    .sorted(Comparator.reverseOrder()); 
    // stream is now [5, 4, 2, 1]

Stream.of("foo", "test", "a")
    .sorted(Comparator.comparingInt(String::length).reversed()); 
    // stream is now [test, foo, a], sorted by descending length

Date has before and after methods and can be compared to each other as follows:

if(todayDate.after(historyDate) && todayDate.before(futureDate)) {
    // In between
}

For an inclusive comparison:

if(!historyDate.after(todayDate) && !futureDate.before(todayDate)) {
    /* historyDate <= todayDate <= futureDate */ 
}

You could also give Joda-Time a go, but note that:

Joda-Time is the de facto standard date and time library for Java prior to Java SE 8. Users are now asked to migrate to java.time (JSR-310).

Back-ports are available for Java 6 and 7 as well as Android.