I'm asking because if you think about it, so much of our history is comprised of bloody conflict and people killing each other, that often the good and neutral things are shadowed over. I remember that from learning about history in grade school, is was all about battles and wars to win over certain countries and colonies. It seems that most people only see the subject of History as a bunch of war movie, so thrilling, intense and exciting when it's filled with action and fighting.
It's an approach that's become mercifully unfashionable in scholarly history (though it keeps trying to claw its way back), but as you observe it retains a powerful grip on the popular imagination. It's also the way we tend to consume news, with the latest political or diplomatic crisis vying for top place with some celebrity misdemeanour while trade agreements or devaluations are relegated to the business section.
But I think it was always thus. Even the ancient chroniclers wrote about the dramatic events of the age, not about day-to-day life: for that we rely on archeology and the occasional surviving record of who owned, owed or received what, plus the odd census fragment preserved probably because it was itself a dramatic exception to the paucity of records of the mundane.
It's probably just down to human nature. We crave excitement, even if it happened two and a half millennia ago. The banal is often more important, but most just find it worthy rather than interesting.
(I did this revealing little test: Google reports 628,000 results for the phrase "million deaths", but only 223,000 for "million births", even though births have outnumbered deaths over the overwhelming majority of history and we're all here because of one.)
What about The Swiss region in the last couple centuries?