i think history depends heavily on the teacher

my early history classes were mostly date memorizing and things that did not matter that much

a few years later i had a history teacher that focused on relating the things that happened, knowing how these events triggered eachother and why they happened. he would often ask us to draw a mind map of the various historical "happenings" that we studied and relate them to eachother, explaining how they lead to eachother. i really liked history that year