Excellent piece. and would especially resonate with anyone who works in education--and with young minds.

Your notion of going to a bookstore or library and browsing to see what's there is interesting. I will say that both public libraries and bookstores tend to carry what will circulate or sell. School libraries are under no such restraints, and as a retired school librarian I will share that my collection was developed to support what my teachers were doing in the classroom.

Your delination between a "history buff" and an historian was great. There's that critical thinking aspect that fits into "historian" that does tend to be in short supply as a "buff", whose interests are more narrow.

The idea that history is not viewed as important to our lives today is unfortunately still a feature of teaching "social studies". I often thought that history and English should be taught together so students would have a better understanding of the literature they were reading, and the place in time that created the author who wrote, let's say, The Scarlet Letter. Oh well. I can dream.