Academic history is too niche today and has become irrelevant. Since univesities are treated like buisneses rather than places or learning, academics are expected to produce new and insightful research material every year. This leads to the academics to look at really obscure and irrelevant things that don't advance our knowledge of history at all and sour people to the subject, just to keep their jobs.

If you want a real study of history, you need to be all encompassing and spend time on the chosen field rather than spending a year learning about what type of ink and paper Napoleon used to write with, using an extreme but true example.