History is hot online. Videos labelled #history have collected over 135 billion views on TikTok. To give a sense of what this means, consider that videos tagged #taylorswift have been viewed around 175 billion times. Not bad for a subject a lot of people avoided in school.
Brevity is one reason. In just a minute or two, you can get a quick tour and history of the secret annex in which Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. Or two minutes explaining how Roman aqueducts worked. Or maybe a series of quick then-versus-now photos from around the world. History online can also be info-taining. In just over thirty seconds, you can see restored footage from 1901, set to modern music, of kids seeing a camera for the first time. Or you can laugh at comedian creator Kyle Gordon’s purposefully sarcastic and over-the-top takes on historical periods. “A nice, tall glass of mercury! This’ll cure my hiccups in no time!” he shouts in a video about “life in the 1800s.”
