Sorry to sound hysterical, but as an actual history buff I hate these fucking memes. The only reason you’d prefer “history as a hobby” is if you’re trying to prove some vague point through cherrypicking historical fact.
Maybe I’m jaded because I know way too many people (I was one of them) who claimed to be “into history” but all they ever wanted to talk about was a few random factoids about World War 2 battles.
It was not until after I moved away from mainstream education that history switched from being my weakest subject to my strongest. I agree with the others here: this is, in all likelihood, an image that’s right for the wrong reasons. History as presented by mainstream educators usually is boring for reasons that James W. Loewen and Michael Parenti outlined in Lies My Teacher Told Me and History as Mystery, respectively. That said, our disinterest has little in common with that of petty bourgeois students, who must think that even the dumbed down McHistory that neoliberals present still isn’t anticommunist enough.
Personally, I do prefer to specify that I refer to modern history when I talk about my excellence in the subject, but sometimes understanding modern history requires me to understand premodern history as well. Mediaeval Europe’s anti‐Judaism helped facilitate Fascist antisemitism, so sometimes I make efforts to study the former to supplement my understanding of the latter. Carl Sagan once said that in order to understand the present, you have to understand the past, so it helps to look for relevance to the present when studying history.