I think those are two completely different things. Learning not to put your hand on a hot stove is direct experience, or cold hard fact as you said. You don't need to remember it perfectly, analyse it, or interpret it. Learning from history requires us to interpret events and trust the historical record. I know with certainty that fire burns but I don't know why empires rose and fell because all I have is stories written by the victors. My point is not that the past teaches us nothing but rather that the further we move from direct experience and into history, the more reconstruction and interpretation creep in.