By historians they mean whoever they could find to act as an appeal to authority. This is like when they ran with the Jefferson banged slaves nonsense, they kept shoveling through historians who said no materials actually supported that view until they found one who took ad hominem attacks from a Jefferson opponent as pure gospel. Then said historian got a book deal to make the case and media ran with it for years and pushed it everywhere they could to discredit Jefferson’s legacy and solidify it as “fact”.