- Explores a big sweeping vision of history through some individual person, event, social movement, or technology, with a title and marketing materials that attach truly unrealistic importance to said person, event, movement, or technology; [...] How the Color Mauve Built the Modern World or Why Ms. Pacman Was the True Leader of the Reaganite Order
- History, in the sense of the assemblage of discrete bits of information that constitute a broad understanding about a particular time period, is a secondary or tertiary concern compared to the justification of the central thesis; indeed, a good gloss on this kind of book is a version of history in which facts are subservient to ideas
- Views the past in a way that suggests that the study of history is the act of assembling anecdotes that underline the book’s big-think message, the one usually expressed in the subtitle; history arranges itself into this convenient format at suspiciously high frequencies
- Omitting inconvenient details and examples that do not fit the described trend is the single most important task in composing the text
- [...] the blanks in our history are not a statement of our inevitable human limitation but instead an implication of sequel potential.

It’s almost like this describes some distinct genre.