it was close enough to appreciate how history gets reconstructed.
Or just constructed in the first place. I have a lot of fancy histories now, and even some primary texts with scholarly annotation, like commentaries on rival versions of them. (Both of the ones that leap to mind are Chinese: Sun Tzu's Art of War, and Lao Tzu's Dao De Ching.)

Primary text often makes interesting reading all by itself (% the language barrier) because, well, sometimes we don't know what the author(s) of significant historical documents meant.