About ishistory
Long-form history for curious people — told as it deserves to be told.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner
Every technology you use was built by someone, in a specific moment, responding to a specific problem. The internet was not inevitable. Artificial intelligence was not inevitable. Neither was the smartphone in your pocket, or the search engine you used to find this page.
These things happened because specific people made specific decisions — and understanding those decisions is the most useful thing you can do if you want to understand where technology is going next.
That is what ishistory is for.
What we publish
Long-form history. Not summaries, not listicles, not "five things you didn't know about Turing." Full stories, properly told, with the context and depth that complex ideas require.
Each series is a sustained investigation of a single field — how it began, how it developed, who built it, what they were trying to do, and what actually happened. We write for people who are genuinely curious and willing to read.
From the bronze giant Talos to GPT — the complete intellectual history of artificial intelligence across myth, philosophy, mathematics, and engineering.
1 episodes · 0 profiles History of the InternetFrom ARPANET to the attention economy — how a cold-war military experiment became the infrastructure of modern life.
1 episodesFrom clockwork automata to humanoid robots — the long story of humanity's quest to build machines that move and think.
27 episodes · In productionBy the numbers
How we write
We believe that the best history writing does three things. It reconstructs the past accurately, drawing on primary sources and serious scholarship. It tells the story in a way that is genuinely readable — not dumbed down, but not needlessly academic. And it asks, throughout, why any of this matters now.
Every article on ishistory is written to be read in full. We do not write for skimmers. We write for people who want to understand something properly — which means giving them the context they need and trusting them to handle complexity.
History is not the past. It is the story of how we became who we are — and the only honest guide we have to where we are going.
Get in touch
We welcome corrections, additional sources, topic suggestions, and general feedback. If you find an error, please tell us — we will correct it and credit you. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, we genuinely want to hear it.