Two hundred years ago, the institutions were very different, and there was much less total intellectual output than a century ago, so it's much harder to do a fair comparison because it's less clear what counts as mainstream and significant.

However, the claim is still flat false at least when it comes to criminal punishment. In fact, in the history of the Western world, the period of roughly two hundred years ago was probably the very pinnacle of the diversity of views on legal punishment. On the one extreme, one could still find prominent advocates of brutal torturous execution methods like the breaking wheel (which were occasionally used in some parts of Europe well into the 19th century), and on the other, out-and-out death penalty abolitionists. (For example, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty altogether in 1786, and it was abolished almost completely in Russia around the mid-18th century.) One could also find all sorts of in-between views on all sides, of course. Admittedly, one would be hard-pressed to find someone advocating a prison system of the sort that exists nowadays, but that would have been economically impossible back in those far poorer times (modern prisons cost tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner-year, not even counting the cost of building them).

Depending on what exactly is meant by "the nature and the contents of history," one could certainly point out many interesting perspectives that could be found 200 years ago, but not today anymore. That, however, is a very complex question. As for gender, well, I'd better not go into that topic. I'll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it's very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.