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I reflexivsly distrust a historian who tells stories this way, at least qua “historian.” They’re both claiming too much—because the record rarely has the resolution of lived experience, so they’re filling gaps—and too little—because a single implied perspective is too narrow.
It’s like in Jurassic Park where they reassure Ian Malcolm that this highly artificial dinosaur ecosystem appears to be quite normal by all the metrics. And he knows something’s gone badly wrong, because something so constructed absolutely shouldn’t.
I recall reading an intelligence history (that I won’t name because it’s otherwise quite good) that opens with a very novelistic description of a scene from the early 20th century & immediately getting my guard up for that reason.
As in: “There’s no way the documentary record includes all these details, and the principals are long dead. How much is plausible color the author added for verisimilitude, and how much license are they taking elsewhere?”
