My personal view is that you should always be wary of people asserting “this is how it is”. We’re in a science sub; we know that the purpose of a hypothesis is to rigorously attempt to disprove it and find counterexamples.

To discuss an area that I know some specifics about and can be more confident on: the historiography of the French revolution. Starting with George’s Lefebvre, the Marxist historians had a clear idea of what the revolution represented: a movement from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist, and so while their work is incredibly important and academically worth studying, they also tend to go into their work with a clear idea of what they wanted to find. So when the revisionists (starting with Cobban) come along, they find a lot of inconsistencies; the facts of the period don’t directly align with what the Marxist narratives wanted it to be (his disagreement is that he thinks the feudal mode was near extinct by the time of the Revolution, and that it was more a political conflict than social).

Bringing it back to your question: I disagree with the narrative I put because I think reductive narratives aren’t helpful, and cause us to miss a lot of nuance. The nuclear family was dominant in England from the 13th Century onwards, but to leave it there misses a host of interesting social structures and changes (e.g. the role of the church and monasteries as social institutions that exist wholly separate from the family).

As for reading, Foucault on how we like to categorise everything is quite interesting. If reading isn’t your cup of tea, the Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC has an episode on Foucault that covers him that’s worth listening to.