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About History Book Tales

Where the past refuses to stay quiet.

History Book Tales is an independent Canadian history publication covering the stories, discoveries, and debates that mainstream history tends to leave out. We write about ancient civilisations, overlooked figures, archaeological breakthroughs, and the moments where the accepted version of the past turns out to be more complicated than the textbook suggested.

Why History Book Tales Exists

Most popular history writing falls into one of two traps: it oversimplifies to the point of distortion, or it buries its most interesting material under academic language that keeps general readers at arm’s length. History Book Tales was built to avoid both. We believe that rigorous historical writing and accessible prose are not opposites — that it is possible to respect the complexity of the past while making it genuinely engaging to read.

We are particularly drawn to the edges of the historical record: the discoveries that force a reassessment of what we thought we knew, the figures who were written out of the dominant narrative, and the moments where archaeology and written history contradict each other in ways that nobody has fully resolved. If a topic has been settled and summarised a hundred times, we are probably not writing about it. If it is still being argued over, we definitely are.

What We Cover

Ancient Civilisations — Egypt, Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, and the cultures that preceded and outlasted all of them. We focus on what the archaeology actually shows, not just what later writers claimed.
Archaeological Discoveries — New excavations, reanalysed finds, and the debates that follow. We cover digs from around the world with a focus on what they change about existing understanding.
Historical Figures — Both the famous and the forgotten. We are as interested in the people the record barely mentions as in the emperors and generals who dominate it.
Unresolved Mysteries — The questions historians and archaeologists have not yet answered, and an honest look at the competing theories on offer.
Medieval & Military History — Campaigns, political structures, and the logistical realities that shaped the outcomes textbooks reduce to a single paragraph.

Our Editorial Approach

Every article published on History Book Tales is written to be accessible to general readers while respecting the complexity of its subject. We work from primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship wherever possible, and we are transparent about the limits of the evidence when the record is incomplete or contested.

We do not publish speculation dressed up as fact, and we do not sensationalise discoveries to drive traffic. When a finding is preliminary or disputed, we say so. Our readers deserve to understand not just what happened, but how confident historians actually are that it happened that way.

Who Runs This

History Book Tales is owned and operated by Alexander McGregor through Auburn AI, a sole proprietorship registered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It is an independently funded publication with no external investors, no parent media company, and no editorial direction from advertisers.

Alexander has over ten years of experience in informatics — the organisation, retrieval, and quality assessment of structured information — and applies that background directly to how this site sources, checks, and presents historical content. He founded History Book Tales because he wanted a history publication that treated its readers as capable of handling complexity, uncertainty, and the occasional uncomfortable revision of a well-known story.

Auburn AI is a Calgary-based operation focused on responsible editorial use of AI-assisted tools in independent publishing. History Book Tales is its primary publication. All editorial decisions, sourcing judgments, and published content are the responsibility of the Auburn AI editorial team under Alexander’s direction.

This is a Canadian-operated independent publication. Our physical base is Calgary, Alberta. We cover history from a global perspective, and where a Canadian or broader North American angle is relevant and honest, we include it — but we do not impose it where it does not fit the material.

Editorial Transparency

We think readers are owed a clear explanation of how content on this site is produced. The following is a straightforward account of our process.

AI-Assisted Drafting

History Book Tales uses AI language tools as part of its drafting and research workflow. This is not something we are coy about. AI assistance is used to accelerate the drafting process, help structure long-form articles, and support initial research gathering. It is a production tool, not an editorial authority.

What AI does not do on this site: it does not make sourcing decisions, it does not determine what claims are accurate, and it does not replace the editorial judgment of the humans reviewing each piece before publication. Every article goes through human editorial review by the Auburn AI editorial team in Calgary before it is published. Factual claims are checked against identified sources. Where the AI draft introduces an error or an unsupported claim — which happens, and which is a known limitation of these tools — that error is caught and corrected at the review stage or not published.

We use AI assistance because it allows a small independent operation to produce consistent, long-form historical content at a pace that would otherwise require a much larger staff. We are transparent about this because readers deserve to know, and because transparency about process is part of what makes a publication trustworthy.

Human Editorial Review

Every piece published on History Book Tales has been reviewed by a human editor before going live. Review covers factual accuracy, source quality, tone, and whether the piece accurately represents the state of evidence on its subject. Articles that cannot be adequately sourced or that make claims we cannot verify are not published, regardless of how well-written the draft is.

The editorial team is based in Calgary, Alberta, and operates under the direction of Alexander McGregor. Where specialist knowledge is required that falls outside the team’s direct expertise, we rely on peer-reviewed secondary sources from credentialed historians and archaeologists rather than on editorial judgment alone.

Corrections Policy

When we get something wrong, we correct it and say so. Corrections are noted in the relevant article. We do not quietly edit errors out of published pieces without acknowledgment. If you have found an error, please contact us at info@historybooktales.com. We read every message and take sourced corrections seriously.

Independence

History Book Tales carries display advertising, including Google AdSense placements. Advertisers have no input into editorial content, topic selection, or how any historical subject is covered. Revenue from advertising is used to sustain the publication. It does not purchase favourable coverage of anything.

We have no affiliation with any university, museum, government body, or political organisation. Our editorial positions are our own and are based on the available historical and archaeological evidence as we understand it.

Editorial Standards

The following describes how we actually work, not an aspirational policy document. These are the standards we apply to every article we publish.

How We Choose Sources

Our sourcing hierarchy, in order of preference, is as follows:

Primary sources — original texts, inscriptions, official records, excavation reports, and other direct historical evidence, accessed through verified academic editions and translations wherever possible.
Peer-reviewed academic scholarship — journal articles and monographs published by credentialed historians, archaeologists, and related specialists, published through recognised academic presses or journals with editorial review processes.
Reputable institutional sources — publications from museums, archaeological organisations, and research institutions with established scholarly standards, such as the British Museum, the Oriental Institute, university archaeology departments, and equivalent bodies.
Quality secondary sources — books written by credentialed historians for general audiences, where the author’s academic or professional background is verifiable and the work is consistent with peer-reviewed scholarship.

Wikipedia is not used as a source. We may use it as a starting point to identify relevant primary or secondary sources, but no factual claim in a History Book Tales article rests on a Wikipedia entry as its sole support. This is not a slight against Wikipedia as a reference tool — it is simply that our sourcing standard requires traceable, attributable evidence, and Wikipedia’s own guidelines acknowledge it is not a primary source.

We do not use content farms, AI-generated encyclopaedias, or sites whose own sourcing is unclear as the basis for factual claims. Where we cite a news report about an archaeological discovery, we look for the underlying study or excavation report and base our coverage on that rather than on the news report alone.

How We Check Dates and Facts

Dates in ancient and medieval history are frequently disputed, approximate, or expressed differently across different scholarly traditions. Where a date is contested or approximate, we say so. We do not present a single date as definitive when the scholarly literature shows meaningful disagreement.

For specific factual claims — the outcome of a battle, the date of an inscription, the contents of a primary text — we require at least one identifiable, credentialed source that directly supports the claim. Claims that appear in AI-generated draft text but cannot be verified against an identified source are removed or flagged for additional research before the article is published.

We acknowledge the limits of the available record honestly. History, particularly ancient history, involves a great deal of uncertainty. An article that pretends otherwise is not serving its readers well. When we write that something “appears to” have happened, or that evidence “suggests” a conclusion rather than proving it, that language is deliberate and accurate.

How AI Assistance Fits Into This

To be specific about what AI assistance means in our workflow: AI language tools are used to produce initial article drafts and to assist with organising research material. They are good at structure, at synthesising broad background information, and at producing readable prose quickly. They are not reliable fact-checkers, they do not have consistent access to current scholarship, and they sometimes produce plausible-sounding claims that are simply wrong.

Our process treats AI-generated drafts the way a newspaper would treat a first draft from a junior writer: as a starting point that requires review, fact-checking, and editorial judgment before it is fit to publish. The AI is a drafting assistant. The editorial responsibility for every published article belongs to the human team.

We do not use AI to generate fake author personas, fabricate quotations from historical sources, or produce content intended to deceive readers about its origins. The use of AI in our workflow is a production efficiency, disclosed openly on this page.

What We Do Not Publish

Speculation presented as established fact
Fringe theories treated as equivalent to the mainstream scholarly consensus without clearly explaining the difference
Sensationalised claims about discoveries that misrepresent what the underlying research actually shows
Content that copies or paraphrases existing articles without adding editorial value or additional sourcing
Articles where the primary factual claims cannot be traced to an identifiable, credentialed source

Content Philosophy

History Book Tales is a history storytelling publication. It is not an academic journal, and it does not try to be one. Understanding that distinction matters for understanding what we do and what we do not claim to be.

Storytelling, Not Scholarship

Academic scholarship produces knowledge. History Book Tales communicates it. Our job is to take the work that historians, archaeologists, and researchers have produced and make it readable and engaging for people who are not specialists. We do not produce original research. We do not make new claims about the historical record. What we do is find the most interesting, well-supported, and under-reported stories in the existing scholarship and tell them clearly.

This means our articles are written as narratives where possible. We want readers to care what happens next. A well-told story about the collapse of the Bronze Age palace economies is more likely to stay with someone than a summary of the academic debate — and if it is well-sourced, it is not less accurate for being readable. The two are not in conflict.

We respect our readers enough not to talk down to them. Accessible writing is not the same as simplified writing. We explain technical terms when we use them, we provide context for claims that might otherwise seem obscure, and we are honest when the evidence is limited or contested. But we do not strip the complexity out of a subject in order to make it easier. Complexity is usually where the most interesting material lives.

A Canadian and North American Perspective

History Book Tales is a Canadian publication, and that shapes some of what we cover and how we approach it. Canadian and North American history is underrepresented in general-audience history writing, which tends to default to a European or American centre of gravity. Where the history of Canada, Indigenous North America, the Arctic, or the broader North American continent is genuinely part of the story we are telling, we include it and treat it as the substantive history it is.

That said, we do not impose a Canadian angle where it does not belong. An article about the fall of Carthage or the construction of Angkor Wat does not need a Canadian connection to justify its place on this site. Our global scope is genuine. The Canadian perspective is something we bring to the work honestly, not something we attach to content as a marketing label.

We approach history with an awareness that the dominant narratives in popular history have often marginalised particular regions, peoples, and perspectives. That is not a political position — it is an accurate description of how the historical record was assembled and transmitted. Acknowledging it makes us better at finding the stories that are worth telling.

On Uncertainty and Honesty

One of the things that makes history genuinely interesting is how much of it remains unsettled. Historians disagree. Archaeologists find things that overturn previous interpretations. Sources that were trusted for centuries turn out to be later fabrications. The record is incomplete, biased, and sometimes contradictory.

We think this is something to be honest about rather than to paper over. A history publication that presents every claim with false certainty is not serving its readers — it is just telling them what they want to hear. When we know something well, we say so. When the evidence is thin, ambiguous, or contested, we say that too. Our readers can handle the truth that the past is more complicated than any single narrative captures. In our experience, that complexity is a large part of why they are here.

Meet the Team

Alexander McGregor — Founder & Editor

Alexander discovered history through a secondhand copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall at age fourteen and has not really stopped since. He oversees editorial direction and writes on Roman history, ancient archaeology, and the history of science and technology. Based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he founded History Book Tales to create the kind of history publication he had been looking for and could not find. He operates the site through Auburn AI, his Calgary-based sole proprietorship, and brings over ten years of informatics experience to the editorial and sourcing standards that govern the publication.

Evelyn Marlowe — Senior Writer, Ancient History

Evelyn specialises in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with a particular focus on the points where archaeology and written records diverge. She is especially interested in the history of Egypt, Greece, and Rome as seen through material culture rather than literary sources, and in the civilisations that existed in parallel with the classical world but rarely make it into popular histories. Evelyn contributes two to three long-form articles per week.

Sebastian Lore — Staff Writer, Medieval & Military History

Sebastian approaches history through the lens of military strategy and political structure, with a talent for narrative-driven writing that makes complex campaigns and court intrigues genuinely readable. He is drawn to the gap between how battles and political crises are remembered and what the sources actually record. Sebastian contributes two to three articles per week and is the site’s primary voice on medieval Europe and early modern conflict.

Get in Touch

We welcome corrections, source suggestions, and questions from readers. If you have spotted an error or have a primary source we should know about, please reach out at info@historybooktales.com. We read everything and take corrections seriously.

For general correspondence, partnership enquiries, or questions about our editorial process, the same address applies. We are a small operation and we respond to email personally.

History Book Tales is published by Auburn AI, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

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