You don’t have to love history to love a good mystery. Start with the mystery.

Subjects get rejected wholesale because of how they were first presented, usually as material to be covered. Underneath, most of them contain the things you already like: a mystery, an argument, a disaster, somebody getting away with something. Coming in through the part that interests you is not cheating. It is how nearly everybody who ended up loving a subject actually started out.

Find one real mystery inside the subject you dislike and chase that instead of the syllabus. Follow it until you need the background, which is the point at which the background turns interesting.