Against the Fire

I think there are two legitimate purposes for historical essays:

(1) providing exposition of an idea or event, or

(2) making an argument with a clear thesis.

If records of an event are disbursed and hard to understand, writing an expository essay explaining what they say is valuable. If some idea is very complex or recondite, or only makes sense in the context of other ideas that are largely forgotten, exposition is equally appropriate. So, for example, it makes sense to write an essay explaining exactly what happened at Katyn Forest in 1940, or what the abbé Sieyès's theory of political representation amounted to.

History doesn't interpret itself, so there is also a place for thesis driven writing. This is where review articles on whether slavery was a necessary complement of capitalism come in, for example.

There's more latitude for books because they are long enough to fulfill multiple functions. But a lot of history books basically fulfill the task of exposition on an ambitious scale; To Stand with the Nations of the World pretends to have a thesis but mostly it just (very successfully) explains what happened during the Meiji Restoration and compares that era of Japanese history to other times and places.

But a lot of historical writing doesn't fall into category (1) or (2). It is neither genuinely expository nor genuinely argumentative. Usually, historical writing that is in neither category is bad. Without the discipline of argument or a clearly defined object of exposition, you get a kind of insight porn that throws around allusive lists of concurrent events and spurious chains of diachronic associations. This sort of writing ends up sounding like:

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe, Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye," Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana...