> I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. History is story-telling. https://www.etymonline.com/word/story https://www.etymonline.com/word

> I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. History is story-telling. https://www.etymonline.com/word/story https://www.etymonline.com/word/story: "connected account or narration, oral or written," c. 1200, originally "narrative of important events or celebrated persons of the past, true or presumed to be; history," from Anglo-French storie, estorie, Old French estoire "story, chronicle, history," and directly from Late Latin storia, shortened from Latin historia "history, account, tale, story. The non-historical sense of "account of some happening or events alleged to have happened" is by late 14c., but the word was not differentiated from history until 1500s and was used at first also in most of the senses of history. In Middle English a storier was a historian (early 14c. as a surname), storial (adj.) was "historically true, dealing with history," and a book of story was a history book." IMO, the title is bad. The complaint in the article isn’t about story-telling, isn’t even about making them (overly) dramatic, isn’t even on not mentioning facts (nobody disputes there were slaves working in those ironworks, or that a man named Cort was nearby at some time), but on adding ‘facts’ and building a story that doesn’t follow from the facts at all.