When alone in drafty halls think not of Richard on his Throne

Historical study is a fearful thing these days. The halls of history, I would argue, have become immensely drafty in the past 100 years. The study has been minimized, quantified, qualified, identified, contained, boxed, and sealed into riduculously small and handy packages, the only trouble being, and curiously this never occured to any of its perpetrators, that these package do not, and cannot serve the slightest possible practical purpose in all the world of humanity.
Not practical, now how can this be? Certainly, gender studies, sociological insights, and race relation research is emminently practical, is it not? Perhaps, and again, perhaps not. The trouble with all this is simply that history has lost all status as an interpretive metanarrative, thus it has devovled simply to a discipline much as electrical enginnering or psychology. History can no longer tell the non-specialist anything useful or prescriptive. It is in many ways a sealed volume.