That still doesn't make it right.
Per Wikipedia (for what that's worth): "Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. Fellow historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment."
History is a set of facts. Facts are facts regardless of how they're spun. If the current spin doesn't truthfully represent the context of the times in which the facts occurred then those facts are worthless for current decision-making. I guess that's why we keep making the same mistakes, and why history repeats (so they say). It just doesn't have to be this way.
You couldn't be more wrong. No fact is meaningful unless it is placed in context. Mathematically, a single data point is meaningless.
A simple example: Let's say 7,863 soldiers were killed at Gettysburg (a reasonable estimate). What is the meaning of this number? Is it a lot or a little? Did it mean anything for the outcome of the war? How does it compare, say, to Revolutionary War battle numbers? Napoleonic War battle figures?
We only understand this number in the context of the Civil War if we know Lee's plans and his strength, Meade's plans and his strength, and the subsequent outcome for both armies. That is done by scholarship, and new information, like letters, battle plans, is regularly uncovered. Or, we discover that earlier scholarship was wrong, and we correct it.
Now . . .
Let's take another, more
controversial, example.
What was the cause of the Civil War? For about 150 years after the end of the war, a set of Southern apologist historians pushed the idea that the war was about states' rights, and that the South was simply defending home and hearth from invaders. The most influential was probably Charles Dunning, a history professor at Columbia University who pushed this idea over his long career. He founded the 'Dunning School', where he, as PhD advisor, produced graduate students who went on to promote the same idea. You know - the whole 'Lost Cause' mythology, along with the 'War of Northern Aggression', 'states rights', etc. (BTW - Woodrow Wilson was one part of the extended 'Dunning School).)
The Dunning School was very influential, because it gave academic cover to some pretty unfortunate ideas. When I was a youth, those ideas still held in a lot of places, and some older school textbooks of my youth even promoted this idea.
You can bet this girl yelling at the top of her lungs (Hazel Bryan) had been taught with those textbooks:
Then, a group of historians in the middle of the 20th century went back and looked at the scholarship, and re-examined the causes of the war. It became clear that the Dunning School was largely driven by white supremacy, and analysis of economic and historical data showed that the war was caused by the South's determination to retain slavery. This idea percolated out of the universities so that by the 1990s it was mainstream, even in the South, although not among older Southern conservatives who still idolized Confederate heroes - especially Lee.
But now,
no serious historian challenges the idea that the Civil War was about slavery. As the whole world passed through the Enlightenment and gave up slavery, the Confederacy was determined to retain it. It was, of course, about money, since about half of the equity in the Confederacy was made up of slaves. The wealthy slave-owners wanted to stay rich. The only 'states right' they cared about was slavery.
So, you see, history
has to be re-examined, because historians are people with biases and agendas (like all of us), and we need to put the harsh spotlight on them. And not too infrequently, we find that the earlier historians were biased or just wrong.
PS -
Apropos of your perspective on history is Charles Dunning's 1913 speech to the American Historical Society: "Truth in History"