This is generally referred to as the "historical-critical" approach to texts, as you are using a critical textual reading to infer the historical reality behind the text. This is a very important tool for the analysis of pre-modern texts, as this "reading between the lines" can answer many questions which would otherwise be obscure. Such an approach is often tied very closely with philology, the art of interpreting language through the lens of culture. An example: if I read a Christian text which says that a certain saint "recalled many people to the Church", I have just learned that heterodoxy or heteropraxy may have been problems in the region when the saint lived (or at least when the text was written). The historical-critical approach, aided by philology, is still one of the main avenues through which many devotional writings such as hagiographies have been found to be historically useful.

HOWEVER (and it is a big however) many of the conclusions drawn by a historical-critical and philological approach are not as strong as they're usually asserted to be. This is particularly true as ancillary supporting evidence becomes harder to find, e.g. when going further back in time. The Book of Daniel and other apocalyptic texts, particularly those in the Biblical tradition, are excellent examples of the way a historical-critical interpretation can go awry.

Every historical-critical approach to an apocalyptic text that I have read (and I have read a lot) is predicated on a simple assumption: the text was a product of its environment, i.e. an apocalyptic text is the product of a communal feeling (real or imagined) of oppression. Thus armed, scholars quest to find the links between known historical oppressions and the context of the apocalyptic text. Having done so, they then use the text to come to other conclusions about the historical milieu.

This is the textbook definition of begging the question. There is absolutely no direct evidence to support the assumption that the creation of an apocalyptic text is the product of historical circumstances. None. And the result is usually bad history. Attempts to argue that the four empires in Daniel relate to four historical empires, for example, always involve some sort of mental contortion to get at least one of the empires to fit. The discussion surrounding the Apocalypse of John is not any better.

So yes, these readings of these texts can be useful, but caveat lector.

We can't know that these writings are veiled history unless we know first what the history was from some other source. Maybe some information in the poetic text corroborates with another source that was previously believed to be rumour / hearsay and maybe this poetic rendition of the history leads historians to the conclusion that the original source had a greater understanding of some event than previously believed, but the problem with poetry is the innumerable ways it can be interpreted.