When I was a pupil, history lessons tended to be a listing of monarchs (or presidents later on), dynastic interests and a lot of battles, and woe to you, when you forgot the years everything happened in.
It were the folksongs where I first learned how the common man felt in those times glorious of victories (defeats are mostly mentioned only when the opposite site got a good biffing. Naturally there are a lot of historical songs, e.g. about the battle at Pavia in 1525, where the German lansquenets beat the French and Swiss, or the deeds of their General v. Frundsberg,where the main events are meticulously reported. Opposite to them are the soldiers songs describing their hard life pressed to service, how they were drilled, beaten with rods, or the terrors of the battlefields (... here you see lying a head cut off, here an aram; God ha' mercy on us, as a German songs puts it). Also the songs of various trades, some proud, some very dreary, especially the bricklayers working in danger on their high scaffoldings. Those songs give a living impresion of the life of our ancestors, and sometimes I'm glad to live in our times with a lot of progres making life a little bit easier.
But the best example I know are the songs of the German revolution in 1848-49. The songs are still sung, especially you heard them at the 150th anniversary. Nearly every family in South Germany has lost a member killed in action, executed, jailed or, in the best case, fled to the US of A because fighting for freedom.
From the singers I learned a totally different approach to history than at school, where we learned, how a rebellion was subdued by the forces of law and justice. These songs held alive the memory of their grand- and great grandfathers and their burdens fighting for a noble cause.
Wilfried