On the value of a contextual History of Science

"We shall recognize also that not only a knowledge of the ideas that have been accepted and cultivated by subsequent teachers is necessary for the historical understanding of a science, but also that the rejected and transient thoughts of the inquirers, nay even apparently erroneous notions, may be very important and very instructive. The historical investigation of the development of a science is most needful, lest the principles treasured up in it become a system of half-understood prescripts, or worse, a system of prejudices. Historical investigation ... brings new possibilities before us, by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental. From the higher point of view at which different paths of thought converge we may look about us with freer vision and discover routes before unknown."

Ernst Mach, Science of Mechanics

Two ways to look at the history of science.

One of the focus of this blog will be the story/history of how the ideas in Physics (allow me to use this anachronistic term) came to be.
We have two ways in which we can do this: either we can look at history with the eyes of the present and judge things accordingly, or we can look into the  past with contextual eyes. That is: we should look into old theories, and ideas not with what we know today in our minds but with what was known at the time.

With the first choice the only insight that we get when looking into the past is that everything is poor and ridiculous science, while with the second choice we get to understand how the ideas that we now have came to be and why they were accepted or rejected in the end.

It is pretty obvious how partial I am to this question and I won't make any feeble attempt to disguise it.
Thus, expect me to take the second road at all times: the analysis and criticism that you'll see will be made, with, what may seem to be, a naive point of a view.