@Ionus,
You display an appalling ignorance of historiography. The "history" to which you refer is simply secondary history--people writing syntheses of primary sources. It ignores great works of secondary history, such as Gibbon's
Decline and Fall, and it ignores that the stuff of written history is primary documents, for which there are literally thousands of years worth of evidence in western civilization. The Greeks and Romans, for example, were avid readers of history, which is why
Ad urbe condita by Titus Livius (Livy) and
The Histories by Polybius remain steady sellers after two thousand years. In the case of Livy, he is the only source for much of his material, which makes him a "default" primary source. Other forms of historiography which you have ignored are archaeology, climatology, historical agronomy, geology--almost all of the sciences contribute a great deal to our understanding of history.
Your view is also "western-centric," it ignores completely the history, for example, of China, for which there are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of primary source documents stretching back in the oldest examples almost three thousand years. The
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as a wonderful example, is arguably the oldest historical novel in existence, written almost seven hundred years ago, and covering the collapse of the latter Han dynasty in the late second and early third centuries, B.C.E. Japanese history only goes back about 1500 years in a written form (once again, archaeology and the historical forms of science cover a much longer period of time), but thanks to the reverence for the institution of the Emperor, those records are wonderfully complete, much better, for example, than European records outside the rump of the Roman Empire in the Gothic period.
History is a great deal more than secondary narratives written in Europe, which began, by the way, a lot earlier than the lifetime of Napoleon. Napoleon was born in 1769. Edward Gibbon published his
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788, while Napoleon was a schoolboy. William Blackstone published his
Commentaries on the Laws of England between 1764 and 1769 (the year Napoleon was born), and it can be considered the first great historical synthesis in the English language. The English were already become as avid a group of readers of history as the Romans were--the first great "best-seller" of an historical work was Walter Raleigh's
History of the World, first published in 1614.
I would suggest to you that you don't know as much about history as you seem to think that you do.
(Yes, Robert, i used Wikipedia to confirm dates and the exact titles of the works to which i refer--but consider that if i didn't already know these things in detail, i'd not have known what to look for at Wikipedia.)
