I can understand where you are coming from, but at the same time, if you are getting anxiety, depression and dread from reading history, and history is constantly telling you of "the capabilities of humanity to inflict pain and trauma in the most brutal and disgusting of ways", I might humbly suggest that you try different history.

A lot of history seems to suffer from a similar bias as news reporting, namely negative events get lots of coverage especially if sudden and catastrophic, while positive and incremental. For instance, there have been quite a few headlines in the US recently as to how the past couple of years have seen a spike in the homicide rate, but there were almost no headlines over the past three decades before that saying "homicide rate continues to fall". As some journalists have noted, there is an inherent bias to be unreserved about bad news but treat any good news with caution and reservations, if at all. There's a similar thing going on with a lot of history.

I say a lot though because not all history is just recounting horrible things. You don't get this as much from culinary history. Or fashion history. Or literary or cinematic history. Or even the history of science. Sure, proper treatment of those subjects needs to acknowledge disparities of power and issues of race, religion, gender and class, but they're not topics of unremitting misery. I'd honestly even throw economic and social history in here too because even when you hit major problems you still have to look at bigger trends and can't just focus on the downs. I think this is one of the reasons I've definitely moved away from military history though, because even though it's an incredibly popular history topic and is important, at the end of the day it's a topic that inevitably is dealing with suffering and death, often for very dubious ends.

Anyway, to focus on my particular flair. I like to joke that there's four things it seems like people care about as far as the Soviet Union goes are famines, gulags, spies and nukes. I guess World War II and also winning very badly argued internet and Twitter debates too. And all the bad things I mentioned did happen and were bad (like, millions of victims bad), but the USSR also has a history of fashion, of cinema, of literature, of food! I did answer a question few days ago about Soviet housing and I admit I talked about a lot of its bad aspects, but while I was writing it I looked at a lot of photos and seeing all the apartments with the oriental rug on the wall and the wood-paneled cabinets really stirred some warm memories of times I shared with people in such apartments, even if some of those people themselves had relatives who had been sent to gulags or themselves deported. Life is a rich tapestry and all that. But the tilt often seems to be towards the bad bits. I think only once have I seen a question here about the history of Indian cinema in the USSR even though that's a real thing with an academically-published book about it and it's something that widely impacted culture in the former Soviet Union.

Anyway, I won't wax too poetic or philosophical here, but for me personally I guess that while I don't have a particularly rosy view of humanity (I really don't buy the "Better Angels" argument), even though humans have an innate capacity for violence and oppression, they also have an amazing capacity to survive and thrive, and probably a unique capacity to actually understand that the bad things that are happening are happening, and that maybe they should try and stop them.

I've also seen it mentioned by a number of people (even flairs here) that also sometimes you need to just put the history aside and go bake something or go for a walk, and those are both something I personally do.

Anyway, sorry if this was a bit rambly.

My thesis focused on church history from the 15th and 16th cenutry - so I read and researched a lot about very detailed things we would call nowadays "brutalities".I approached these events often with kind of a "scientific distance". I constantly asked myself if the source was reliable and/or either apologetic or polemic.

While cirtically working with these type of events and sources I quite rarely thought further about all these horrific indicdents but instead tried to understand them from the historic and contemporary viewpoint. Burning is quite possibly one of the most cruelful ways to execute someone. But in the eyes of the prosecutor and often in the eyes of the witnesses it was a fair sentence given the circumstances. For example while Girolamo Savonarola was burned, all of his adversaries thought that this "devil" deserves do be punished for all eternity while his followers secretly could only think about how he foretold his own martyr, thus gaining hope, that his other prophecies will come true as well - and that he, in the end, was a true prophet after all.