Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Accounts of the past are written by somebody, usually somebody with an interest in how it reads. Doubt is not cynicism in that setting; it is the ordinary discipline of asking who is telling you this, what they gained, and what the people who left no records would have said. The care you would apply to an argument belongs equally to a story about what happened.

Try it on something close to home. Family history, company history and national history all get smoothed in the retelling, and the smoothing tends to favour whoever survived. Ask one real question about a story you have accepted for years.