It is interesting to note that history, as a symbolic abstraction, must perhaps (and necessarily) constitute the aggregate sum of all aspirationally least-incorrect assumptions, mnemonics, cartographies and narrative conveniences. The path through any forest can be as popular, arbitrary or random as you would prefer to choose and while we might consider it as an intractable burden of Free Will that we might never as often shape the menu of choices so much as we are shaped by them, the path less-travelled is very often the primary source of authentically-valuable insights and knowledge.
It is, indeed, a shared burden of discursive self-surveillance that we all for the most part shun intuition and creative insight when appraising asserted facts and follow the path of least resistance to suspend our disbelief in the tropes and conventional (historical, among others) errata with which we are confronted. Value is derived from novelty (and innovation) of perception but psychological security is derived from tribalism and submission to accepted wisdom(s). In this way, history tends to ponderously, shamelessly invalidate the key insights that it claims sole inheritance to. History is a curious enigma of shared memory and the unwitting failure of (a) compliant forgetting.
Daedelus Kite 