Knowledge

History Explained

Evergreen context on history, distilled into calm, readable pulses.

Most history writing assumes you already know the period it's explaining, which is exactly backwards for anyone trying to understand why today's headlines look the way they do. Briflio's History hub is built as background reading for the present: short explainers on the patterns, empires, and turning points that keep resurfacing in modern politics, trade, and conflict — without requiring a prior course in the subject. Each pulse is evergreen by design, meant to be useful whether you land on it the day it's published or a year later.

History

Why France’s illustrious history of cheesemaking is full of holes

Bréhémont, clayn, chalamon or craponne… Never heard of them? These cheeses of old speak volumes about France’s history of cheesemaking.

History Explained

Why France’s illustrious history of cheesemaking is full of holes

Why Pompeii Preserved Ordinary Roman Life So Well

Why the Black Death Changed Workers' Bargaining Power

The Stone That Let Us Read Ancient Egypt

The Ship Burial That Complicated the Dark Ages

Why Magna Carta Mattered More After It Failed

The Twin Towers shaped the Manhattan skyline for decades. Now, it’s shaped by their absence

Our pay is called a ‘salary’, but were Roman soldiers really paid in salt?

Palaces and the Pope: the fascinating story of how Renaissance Rome was rebuilt

How medieval infertility was experienced and understood

Would You Eat a Cookie Made From Upcycled Plastic? Scientists Propose a New Way to Deal With Waste and Provide Food in Extreme Environments

Is history a school subject in crisis? New research shows it isn’t, at least not yet

The strange history of bigamy in England: fake tears, secret weddings and double lives

Revolutionary War battlefields often romanticize combat, but this mass grave just outside Philadelphia shows the violence soldiers actually experienced

The Bayeux tapestry’s lesser-known tale of bromance: William and Harold were friends before they were enemies

The Mocha monopoly: how Yemen’s dominance of the global coffee trade birthed the Houthi rebels

Lactose intolerance is actually the human norm – but racism, the US government and business interests have made it into a condition

In 20th-century India, the perfect Hindu wife was… a man

Why Magna Carta Survived Its Own Failure

The Grave That Changed the Meaning of Dark Ages

The Moon Landing Was Also a Sample Return

The Stone That Taught Us to Read Hieroglyphs

Why Pompeii Became an Accidental Time Capsule

What three female figures in the Bayeux tapestry reveal about medieval women

Changing the history curriculum is not enough if English always dominates the classroom – South African study

The enduring mystery of Scotland’s medieval cannibals

A brief history of embroidery – and how to get started yourself

Lucianne Tonti’s deeply personal history of witch hunts overstates the role of misogyny

Ancient forests took 100,000 years to recover from the last global warming period similar to today – Wyoming fossils reveal what happened

Is this the world’s oldest image of a mind-altering plant?

Love across racial boundaries: the true history behind Netflix’s My Brilliant Career

Inside the antarctic expedition that made Shackleton and Scott famous – and paved the way to the South Pole

Who really wrote Elizabeth I’s angriest letter? New research reveals a hidden hand

How Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18th-century royal PR strategy

Today’s arguments about disability benefits have been raging for 500 years

Science, religion, and political omens: the meaning of eclipses in ancient Rome

How grief tech is reimagining Victorian spiritualism

Medieval England had a defamation problem: how people used the law to fight rumours, insults and rivals

Six of history’s most dangerous fashion trends

New theory on how six-tonne Stonehenge rock was transported from Scotland thousands of years ago – by a glacier

Andy Burnham’s No 10 North has a precedent – in medieval York

One grain to rule them all: the history of rice as a global food

The historic German housewives who laid the groundwork for today’s tradwives

Bird droppings were a foundation of modern agriculture and American empire

Ancient Egyptian princesses weren’t just figureheads – their weapons reveal lives of skill and strength

Poop From Southern Right Whales Reveals That the Animals Might Be More Resilient to Climate Change Than We Thought

Burnout isn’t new — 18th-century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustion

How controlling (and tolling) a narrow waterway near ancient Troy changed history

The Odyssey is set in a fantasy world – but the ancient Greeks mapped it onto what they knew

Spain’s schools are still glossing over the Spanish civil war and the Franco dictatorship. How do we teach these crucial events properly?

Can we map The Odyssey? How ancient geographers and modern researchers have traced Odysseus’s travels

The Bayeux tapestry and the hidden history of the women who embroidered it

Industrial Revolution

A goat’s tooth may have solved a 100-year debate about ancient Greek farming

Supermarkets are going back to the future

Three historic craft hobbies at risk of disappearing – and how to give them a go

Robin Hood was often far more violent than modern legend – but he wasn’t the most extreme medieval outlaw

The Titanic ‘curse’ and the forgotten fearless life of the captain’s daughter

This Renaissance queen helped build a nation. Her (male) critics called her dangerous

Bretton Woods system

Coming out on TV in 1970 could have ruined your life – so why did activists do it?

House of the Dragon: four real historic women who inspired the show

Peace of Westphalia

Washington reflecting pool saga is just the latest example of man trying to dominate nature – and losing

Age of Discovery

Australia was built on migration, but it’s long been a love-hate relationship

What Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie remake says about today’s culture wars

Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Philadelphia in 1976 was mysterious and deadly – 50 years later, scientists know the cause but outbreaks continue

Bingles, knuckleballs and ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ – hundreds of forgotten works showcase the eclectic world of baseball scholarship

We analyzed paper money printed by Ben Franklin to uncover his anti‑counterfeiting techniques and materials innovations

Before banks, nuns lent money: how convents helped power medieval Vienna’s economy

Silk Road

Pax Romana

Victorians called burnout ‘overwork’ – and they cured it by holidaying in France

Hugh Jackman plays Robin Hood as wicked – it’s a badly timed take on the hero of the poor

I study the Declaration of Independence, and here’s why the colonists’ grievances are surprisingly relevant, 250 years later

‘2,500 years of tyranny and submission’: what we can learn from reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis during the Iran War

History shows quarantine can be a blip – or mark some people forever

Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works