About Ink Before Dust
Ink Before Dust tells the stories history wrote down, and then forgot. The ships that sank in front of crowds. The libraries that “burned” in legends but faded in reality. The builders and officials whose names were left off the monuments they built.
Narrated history documentaries, myth-vs-fact breakdowns, short biographies of overlooked people, and the occasional top-5 list. Each one is researched from primary sources, museum records, and modern scholarship. Sources are listed in every description, and when historians disagree or the evidence is thin, we say so.
Curious about a forgotten story? Suggest it in the comments on our YouTube channel.
How this site works
This site is a companion to the channel. Every public video gets a page with a short summary of the story in our own words, its chapters, and the full list of sources from the video description.
AI disclosure
Narration is AI-generated. Scripts are AI-assisted and fact-checked against the sources listed.
Coming soon: classic book summaries
We plan to add short guides to public-domain classics, written in our own words. Nothing is published yet.
Image credits
- Why Did the Mongols Turn Back?: Card artwork: Ink Before Dust (own work).
- The Man Who Found Rome's First Water: Thumbnail: "Aqua appia planlatium" (Droysen 1886 base map, route overlay by Coldeel 2008), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; tinted and cropped.
- The Library That Burned Twice? What Was Really Lost: Thumbnail: "The Great Library of Alexandria – Colorized", 19th-century rendering by O. von Corven, colourised by K. Vail Abdelhamid (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons; converted to duotone. It is an artist’s impression, not a record of the building.
- The Warship That Sank Within Minutes of Setting Sail: Thumbnail: Vasa stern photograph ("Sweden, Stockholm, Djurgården Island, Vasa Museum, Vasa (1628), Stern 150628-60.jpg") by Richardmaackphotography, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden,_Stockholm,_Djurg%C3%A5rden_Island,_Vasa_Museum,_Vasa_%281628%29,_Stern_150628-60.jpg); cropped, darkened and text added.
Logo and site design: own work. Fonts: Cinzel and Inter, SIL Open Font License 1.1.