Great essay. Reminded me of this quote by the great Jacques Barzun:
"History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction."
History, like language, is a tool. It is a tool that can be used for seeding a conceptual framework in the minds of the readers. It may be for political purposes, for entertainment purposes or for academic purposes. Facts, when artfully pieced together, can be used to tell many, many different stories.
When I read history for entertainment, I always read several books by different authors to find the gist of the history described in those books. But even then, I know that the source materials themselves are most likely flawed, biased, incomplete and generally unreliable.
History is important, but one has to do battle with it to gain anything useful.
"History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction."