Genericity of historic behavior for maps and flows

We establish a sufficient condition for a continuous map, acting on a compact metric space, to have a Baire residual set of points exhibiting historic behavior (also known as irregular points). This criterion applies, for instance, to a minimal and non-uniquely ergodic map; to maps preserving two distinct probability measures with full support; to non-trivial homoclinic classes; to some non-uniformly expanding maps; and to partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms with two periodic points whose stable manifolds are dense, including Ma\~n\'e and Shub examples of robustly transitive diffeomorphisms. This way, our unifying approach recovers a collection of known deep theorems on the genericity of the irregular set, for both additive and sub-additive potentials, and also provides a number of new applications.