That's a really great point. The lack of information about people was probably what had me uninterested in history class but reading a lot of historical fiction as a kid. I remember lots of timelines and maps from class, sometimes architecture and economics, but little about individual figures and almost nothing about how regular people lived.

I feel like a lot of Canadians of my generation retained a lot more historical knowledge from Heritage Minutes (a series of one-minute documentaries that used to play during commercial breaks on television), and while part of that is the medium, I think another big part was having human narratives to hang the times and places on.