The Colors of History are still “Somewhere over the Rainbow”

I want to put doilies and flowers into my historical writing: that's right. You can make fun all you like. That's the problem with writing about history. It seems wrong or inappropriate to write down a beautiful field of colors and dreams and poetry while writing about political movements and how a bunch of guys with mustaches and pipes created nationalities, states, languages, citizenship rights and constitutions; and how am I supposed to make a war sound fascinatingly beautiful without literally writing poetry and calling myself a Mickiewicz in Graduate school? What do you compare a war to in the garden? A drought? A blizzard? A flood? A galloping herd of the deer and the rabbits going at it against each other and eating up all of the tomatoes and squash? Let's try it. There must be a way to add color to history; or to historians, for that matter. Maybe by integrating the magical realism of the Bug river when describing the fall of the Roman Empire, more sexuality and scandal, maybe simply more mysticism in the shooting of Stalin's victims or perhaps describing the terrain where the trenches were dug through color, reminding the reader that only 2 weeks earlier, a maiden had her first kiss there and two years before that, she and her sisters found a birds' nest and sang to the butterflies. Is that too “girlie”? Why else would it be so important to a Biographer what shoe Stalin's father beat him with? Though that's hardly adding a doily here and a rose there. Or does that actually give the history more life, meaning, a little more context of the lives that history tries to bring to our current understanding of the world. Why else would national movements be so important and why else is the rule of law and the integrity of a state constitution, or the history of how it became this way, is so vital to our everyday lives today, now, in our current situation? Well, these are silly questions: they are important in and of themselves. My question is, how do I have a chance to play and enjoy writing this history? Or are some questions too serious to play with?!