You're not reading too much into it, Amazeroth.
The author isn't suggesting that 'history is change', but he's suggesting that this is the general Western conception of history. It is an orientalist perception, you see it in depictions of Indian civilisation during the 19th Century. It's all linked to a Western idea of 'progress', of which Americans are still particularly fond, that history is a progression and that civilisations must always be moving. The author is critiquing this position (Holmberg's mistake) rather than suggesting it is correct.
Of course history is not the same as change, and I don't believe the author meant to suggest it was. Amazeroth, I also disagree that change is omnipresent or inevitable. I just believe that the last few centuries of Western civilisation, which have been characterised by a hitherto unseen (in ten thousand years of human history) rapid advancement in many areas of our life, and a rapid expansion of humanity across the globe.