I totally agree with you. I don't think history and many of the humanities can be distiller into 10 minute chunks. I don't think it would be fair to distil World War II into 15 minutes, much less the last 100 years. Trying to distil romanticism into 15 minutes seems just as impossible, since to understand romanticism, you need to understand the changing, industrializing world that birthed it.
My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.
Couldn't you also say that its impossible to condense calculus into 10 minute chunks because you have to understand Algebra first? All learning requires context, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether can break it up into courses, books, chapters, lectures, or 10 minute chunks.
Absolutely. But you can't teach calculus in 10 minutes. Pretending you can teach 40 years of 20th century history in 10 minutes is just silly, even if you are just giving an overview. At some point, the overview becomes meaningless and information free.
My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.