History Memes

Well, that seems blatantly inaccurate. There's an absolute tidal wave of popular history content available for layperson consumption. Forget the books that are published which are aimed at general audiences (of which there are dozens, if not hundreds, every single year), you've also got YouTube videos, hobby blog posts, more podcasts than stars in the sky, and so on. These are of varying quality, but so is the academic stuff. Plenty of really great, insightful research is published. And plenty of useless dreck emblematic of academia's tendency towards chasing one's own tail is published too. With that being said though, if you're reading a journal article, i.e. published by academics for academics, you shouldn't be surprised if the language leans on jargon, even if it isn't "good writing" necessarily.