There is a valuable place in the world for "popular histories". Books that get the non-specialist reader interested in a particular topic, era, or person by presenting information about it in an informal "sound-bite" fashion, and especially by focusing on images or claims that will catch the imagination.
The problem comes when those sound-bites part ways with the documentable facts and yet are passed along from hand to hand as "historic truth." (Internet memes aren't the origin of this problem.) Once a factoid has taken off across the fields of the audience, wild and free on its own, it can be extremely difficult to track it back to its inspiration. It's much harder to prove a negative than a positive. If the factoid did have a documentary basis, it may be possible to establish the actual truth and show how it was stretched to make a better story. But if the factoid came entirely from someone's imagination (or from misunderstanding the historic context, or from a string of "what-ifs" and "probablys") then it can take a lot of work to demonstrate the underlying lack of substance. And if the factoid took off precisely because it captured the popular imagination, then the audience you're trying to convince of its lack of substance may be actively hostile to your project.
This is what I face in trying to establish the historic facts and sources behind Burford's offhand claim that there were houses of ill repute in 18th century London that catered to women having sex with women.
(Go follow the link at the end of the entry to the "Charlemagne's Cheese" article. It will demonstrate all these problems a lot more clearly.)
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