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.
To give my perspective to the other commenters: Where I grew up we had a pretty good history curriculum.
It focused a lot on material analysis. In class 1 the first things we learned was to ignore the excuses for wars (like these people went to fight these other people because of an insult) and find the actual material causes (like these people lived on land that was more fertile than the other people’s lands). The second thing we learned was how social classes define governing policy. This was a theme throughout every year. Looking back, that was pretty surprising considering how anticommunist many people are in my country, and how right-wing governments had been ruling for like 30 years straight at that point.
One year we devoted to deeply studying Thucidides’ Peloponessian War, which is basically the first materialistic analysis of historical events.
There were some negative aspects, like teachers usually being ultranationalists who disregarded the curriculum and went straight for propagandizing us. Or some “incovenient times” being covered very shortly and shittily. Or too much emphasis on analyzing art in the ancient world (after the first week, it’s hard to get excited about people deciding to stop painting animals on walls and instead use triangles and circles). The worst part was that the curriculum stopped just before WW1. Our books had chapters on modern history but we never covered them (again those “inconvenient times” coming up).
But overall it was fun and stimulating. A big reason I became a Marxist was that when I was reading Marx, his analysis was already making sense for me. I didn’t have to deconstruct any lies I learned in school (thankfully those ultranationalist teachers were transparent enough to pick up on their bullshit). Class struggle drives history? Yeah, I already learned that. Material analysis? Yeah, I already know how to do that. It was easy to see that Marx’s observations were astute and his conclusions solid.