Pseudo-history, and related issues

[Jona Lendering]

Does part of the problem lie in the fact that regular historians, academicians and the like, care so little to make their histories interesting?

I get the idea that it's the other way round. When they write for a larger audience, many historians have to treat subject outside their specialism, and fall back upon "common knowledge", and usually, people remember what's most spectacular. The professor who is specialised in, say, the Seleucid Empire, can honestly believe that Archimedes built a heat ray. If he wants to tell an interesting story, he will tell that.