I would object to regarding history as a narrative rather than a coherent body of evidence. Stories tend to misrepresent, manipulate, and outright lie. They encourage us to "fill in the gaps" with our own biases. In fact, "just so stories" (from a Kipling book, a kind of Ovid's Metamorphoses for little kids) is now a mostly a derogatory term for narrative instead of evidence (and is applied to entire subfields like Evolutionary Psychology which do the same).