About Writesides of History

Writesides of History is an independent history publication. Everything on this site is researched, written, edited and published here: there is no third-party byline, nothing is syndicated or bought in, and no article is commissioned by anyone with an interest in how it turns out. The publication is the author of the work and answerable for it.

The library now runs to more than two hundred articles across five periods — prehistoric, ancient, medieval, early modern and modern — alongside topic guides that tie a subject together, and a small range of maps, classroom packs and dossiers in the shop. You can read every article free, in full, without an account.

How a subject is chosen

Subjects are not picked because a phrase is popular. Three things decide what gets written next:

• A question worth answering. An article starts from something genuinely unclear or genuinely misremembered — why a thing happened, how it was paid for, what a symbol meant to the people who used it — rather than from a topic that merely sounds interesting.
• Where the coverage is thin. Publication rotates across the five periods, and subjects are chosen where this site's own coverage of a cluster is incomplete, so that a reader who follows one thread finds the surrounding articles rather than a dead end.
• What readers are actually looking for. Search demand is one input into the queue. It decides what gets written sooner; it never decides what an article concludes.

Where the facts come from

Every article ends with a bibliography naming the works it rests on. Those works are chosen in this order:

1. Primary sources, where they exist and can be consulted — statutes, treaties, edicts, chronicles, trial records, inventories, excavation reports, contemporary correspondence. Where a primary source is partisan, or was written to justify what it describes, the article treats it as evidence of a position rather than as a neutral record.
2. Scholarly publications — the historians and archaeologists who have done the reconstruction, cited in the edition actually used, with author, publisher and year.
3. Institutional sources — national archives, museums, libraries and university collections, for documents, objects and catalogue records.

No work is listed that does not exist under that title, from that publisher, in that year. Where a source cannot be verified, it is not used, and no reference is invented to fill a gap.

Bibliography and Recommended reading do different jobs

Two lists appear under an article and they are not interchangeable.

• Bibliography is the accounting. It names the works the article itself rests on — what was read to establish the claims above it. It is not a reading suggestion and it carries no commercial link.
• Recommended reading is a suggestion. It names books worth reading next on the same subject, for a reader who wants to go further. Some of these are affiliate links, which is disclosed on the page and in the footer.

Keeping them apart matters: a book that pays a commission can never count as evidence for a claim. The editorial policy sets out that separation, and the rest of the standard, in full.

When the evidence is unclear

History is frequently unsettled, and an article that hides this is worse than one that admits it.

• Where historians disagree, the article says so and attributes each position rather than presenting one reading as settled.
• Where the evidence runs out, the article says that too, instead of closing the gap with a confident sentence.
• Dates carry their precision: an approximate date is marked approximate, a disputed year is described as disputed, and a decree is distinguished from the years it took to carry out.
• Legend is named as legend. Pseudo-history — lost civilisations, ancient astronauts, suppressed truths — is not published here, and not as "some people say" either.

Images and archive objects

Article images are either produced for this site or come from public-domain and openly licensed collections. Where an article is illustrated by a real object — a print, a manuscript page, a coin, a photograph — that object carries its own page naming the maker where known, the collection it is held in, the source it came from, and the licence it is available under. Public domain is stated rather than left blank: it is a legal finding, not an absence of provenance. Anything whose rights cannot be established does not go on the page.

Corrections

If you find an error — a date, a name, an attribution, a claim the sources do not support — please write and say which article and what is wrong. There is one address, and the contact page explains what else it is for.

Writesidesofhistory
Langstraat 45
5963 NV Hegelsom
The Netherlands
info@writesidesofhistory.com

Corrections are made to the published page rather than left to stand with a note elsewhere. Where a correction changes the substance of an article, the change is described on the page. Where it changes the article's address — because a wrong year was in the title, for instance — the old address keeps working: it redirects permanently to the corrected page, so that existing links, bookmarks and citations do not break.

Where to go next

• Search the library by person, place, event or period.
• The A–Z index — every published article in one list.
• Topic guides — a whole subject tied together, with timelines and related articles.
• Editorial policy — the full standard, including what will not be published and how the site is funded.
• Contact — corrections, permissions, teaching enquiries and orders.