a certain kind of WWII-obsessed history buff cares a LOT about like...timelines and numbers and battles and all the little nitpicky details about the Military Experience, and not about anything else, and that kind of person clearly spends a lot of time on wikipedia. The very bones of the article are designed around that particular perspective on history to such a degree that the article couldn't really be anything else without a complete overhaul, and it's just SO completely opposite to the kinds of priorities of the book I just finished reading that I was kind of flabbergasted. It is not an approach to history that I find interesting or understandable at all. To me that data is relevant for how it informs you about the lived experiences people had, and what it meant to people/communities/countries/the world -- how it contextualizes the human story -- rather than the data being interesting in its own right.

I know exactly what you're talking about, and your perspective is one I share. It's so interesting that people can be interested in history, but have such wildly different understanding of what 'history' can be. Like you I'm much more interested in knowing about people's lived experiences — the grandfather one of my good friends in high school fought for the USSR during the Leningrad siege, and I remember her telling me that he and his fellow soldiers had to light fires underneath tanks and trucks in order to prevent the petrol from freezing. That small human detail has always stuck with me, way more so than a wikipedia article full of dry facts and figures.

The book sounds really interesting.