Technically the same process, it's just that both American public schools and universities have dogshit history curriculum and most of the people in them are the I FUCKING LOVE HISTORY crowd, ie Pop History.
It's the type of history that has absolutely zero nuance, surface level facts, and a very obvious bias from sheer ignorance. Source? Speaking to someone who is dipping his toes into the two deeply pozzed academic fields of History and Anthropology for some fucking reason. My archaeology professor is pretty based though, he knows COVID is bullshit and that theres so much bloat everywhere.
It's honestly really fucking frustrating to hear that Pop History is the norm.
I remember how in high school, we used to learn about the Ottoman occupation in Hungary, with fun facts sprinkled in (like how places like Kecskemét were under direct control of the pasha of Buda, being spared from the raids of the sipahis as a result) the overall kind of shallow but nonetheless solid classes.
Then I went to university, and I realized why it had to be simplistic: a high schooler would probably not grasp what Condominium means in the context of Habsburg-Ottoman relations (both sides would raid eachother's territory due to claims based on either being the titular King of Hungary or on the defters that the Ottomans used as a sort of ad-hoc grant to the land they taxed once) and the Maturity Exam (Abitur in German, érettségi vizsga in Hungarian) doesn't include the fascinating things we studied in university, so the average student doesn't give a shit about them anyway. It wasn't because the history teachers didn't know these things - they did - but because they had to deal with teenagers.
A lot of my professors were autistically obsessed with their field, making sure to correct every single assumption that students probably held, so it kind of beat into us that you can't take anything, much less hearsay, at face value. I think I mentioned the case of the "Papal Poo Penitentiary" case somewhere else, which was hilarious, mortifying and informative all at once. Basically, a (I think) 14th century bullator (one of the guys who seals Papal decrees in the name of the Pope) from Krakow went to the privy, dropped a document in there, had to get a servant to retrieve it and the servant drowned, resulting in the bullator being charged with manslaughter, with the evidence our professor brought in being a letter to the Apostolic Penitentiary, asking for absolution. The professor then highlighted that, contrary to popular belief, church servants (most of whom were serfs from church lands) were not seen as property to be abused, even if their lives were not as highly regarded as that of a nobleman, the fuming hatred of a Medievistics professor's righteous anger towards the unjust way the Middle Ages are portrayed brewing in her eyes as she told us.
Other fun stuff included how the Mongols asked everyone everywhere all the time what the purpose of their trip into the Mongol lands (13th century, so almost all of Eurasia) was. If you were caught giving two different answers, you were thought of as a spy and you were probably beaten to death. I swear, they had a more effective way of filtering out spies than the US did before the Cold War.
Anyway, I think the main reason why Hungarian historians take their subjects so seriously is because we're right next to it all the time (there are castles in this country that have been preserved more or less intact since the 14th century, like Sirok - which is a really cool one since it includes a cave as well) and it's the #1 cornerstone of our culture. What Freedom is to Americans, History is to us - so those that are serious about it go above and beyond to honor it properly.
