Editorial Standards

History is full of great stories, and plenty of them aren’t true. This page explains how History Republic decides what to write about, where our facts come from, how we handle legends, and what we do when we get something wrong. We’re a small fan-run site, not historians, so we try to show our work.

Sourced. Corrected. Independent.

How We Pick Topics

We write about people and events whose actions changed the world around them and still shape ours: the rulers, generals, rebels and thinkers, and the battles and decisions that turned history. We favour stories where the sources give us something solid to work from, and where what really happened is more interesting than the legend. Plenty of stories start with a simple question: “Did that really happen?”

How We Source a Story

We separate two kinds of source, and we tell you which is which.

Primary sources are the closest we can get to the events: ancient and medieval historians, letters, chronicles and inscriptions. Examples are Polybius and Livy on Hannibal, Suetonius and Plutarch on Caesar, Einhard on Charlemagne, and Bahā’ al-Dīn, who served at Saladin’s side, on Saladin. Primary sources are precious, but they are not neutral. Their authors had loyalties, grudges and patrons, and many wrote long after the events. We say so when it matters.
Secondary sources are modern historians who study those texts alongside archaeology and other evidence. We rely on scholarship from university presses, peer-reviewed journals and established historians.

We’re adding a Sources & further reading section to the end of every story. It lists the modern books we used and recommend, so you can explore further. We check every link before it goes in.

Where the old writers give numbers, such as army sizes, casualties and ransoms, we report them as their numbers. When they disagree, we give you both figures, and we tell you when modern historians think the totals are too high.

Myth or Fact

Some of the best-known “facts” in history are later inventions. When a story has a famous legend attached, we keep it, because legends are part of history too, but we label it clearly:

What the sources show: what the evidence says happened.
The legend: what later ages added, and when.
The debate: where historians still disagree, and why.

If we can’t trace a claim to a source, we don’t present it as fact. You’ll find these stories under Myth or Fact.

Corrections

We will get things wrong sometimes. When we do:

Tell us through the Contact page. Please include the story and, if you can, the source that shows the error.
We check it against the sources. If you’re right, we fix it.
Factual fixes are noted at the end of the story with the date and what changed. Typos and broken links are fixed quietly.
We never quietly rewrite a story to change its conclusion.

AI and Images

Illustrations are artistic reconstructions. Many of our images are created digitally, sometimes with AI tools, to help you picture a scene. They are interpretations, not period artwork, and we don’t present them as such. Where we use a real artefact, painting, map or photograph, we credit it.
Writing and research. We may use AI tools to help with research and drafting, and every fact is checked against the sources before it goes live. If we can’t verify it, it doesn’t run.

Book Links and Independence

History Republic is independent and reader-supported. Our book links are plain links, and we list a book because it’s a solid place to explore further. If that ever changes and we earn from book links, we’ll say so on this page, and it will never decide which books we recommend.

Keep Exploring

The History Republic app is free to download, with an interactive map of where history happened, short biographies of history’s heroes, and quizzes. Download on the App Store