Which celebrity break-up was saddest – the untimely uncoupling of Love Island stars Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury, or the brutal breakdown of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s marriage?
Katie Kennedy, also known as @thehistorygossip, couldn’t decide between them, although she did concede that “Henry and Anne’s break-up showed a lot more physicality, for example, Anne’s head got chopped off”.
Such goes one of 25-year-old Katie’s hilarious TikTok videos, where she teaches viewers silly, cheeky – and often bawdy – history lessons. Despite posting history content on the app for less than a year, her star is very much on the rise, with 507K followers, 14 million likes, and a new book out to boot.
That book, The History Gossip: Was Anne Of Cleves A Minger? And 365 Other Historical Curiosities, is a tongue-in-cheek whirlwind through 365 days of history – with one snappy, irreverent entry for every day of the year.
“It’s almost the same format as my TikTok channel,” explained Katie. “You don’t have to read it from cover to cover, you can pick it up and read any page. It’s very chill! It’s important to me that history is easy to access and digestible.”
Comedy and history
Funny people like Katie have always been drawn to comedy – think Blackadder and Monty Python. But she is one of a new wave of historians and comedians bringing comedy to history in the digital age.
Chatty, light-hearted podcast The Rest Is History is one of the most listened to in the UK, and funnyman David Mitchell’s audiobook Unruly, A History Of England’s Kings And Queens, has dominated the Audible history bestseller chart since it was released last year.
Katie’s approach, full of pop culture references and modern slang, feels especially fresh and youthful, born from the wry, subversive humour popular with Gen Z.
Her charmingly droll take on some of history’s most shocking scandals is winning her more and more fans every day – even among people who would previously never consider themselves history buffs.
She said: “When I got into history, it was through things like the Horrible Histories TV show, which was really funny and you wanted to watch it. You didn’t feel like you were learning. When you’re in a classroom it’s like, ‘on this day, this happened’ and ‘then this happened’, but there’s so much spicier history. It can be really fun, so I try to make it funny.”
@thehistorygossip I’m so excited to finally share this with you🥺 Pre order my debut book here: https://bit.ly/46ZsTTW (link in my bio too) Send your receipt to publicity@mombooks.com for a chance to win some super sexy History Gossip goodies 👀 #history #historytok #historytime #historybuff #learn #book #bookworm #bookish #Inverted
While Katie is always on hand with a quip, she is keen to stress that everything in her book and on her TikTok channel is rooted in historical fact.
“It is satire, but it is also true! There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet, and I always make sure to post my sources on my videos so people can easily find them and read up on them.
“I’ve seen an online video go around a few times that, in a letter to his wife Josephine, Napoleon wrote ‘home in three days, don’t wash’. But if you look into the source, the first time it is mentioned is in the 80s and it doesn’t go back to an original source from the time. So, it’s about debunking historical rumours too.”
Katie graduated from Durham University with a first class degree and is now studying mid-18th-Century history at Oxford for her masters. If she was nervous to tell her Oxford tutors about her cheeky online history content, she shouldn’t have been – they loved it.
“They took it really well, which I was surprised about. It’s very traditionally academic at Oxford, but everyone is really supportive. They said, ‘We think it’s great that you’ve reached an audience that might not have necessarily liked history before, or that did it at GCSE level and then forgot about it’.
“Sometimes I get lovely comments on my videos with people saying, ‘I’m going to study GCSE history because of you’ or ‘I’m revising for my GCSEs with your videos’, which I love – as long as they are not quoting me word-for-word,” she joked.
Katie has been shortlisted for Education Creator of the Year at the first-ever TikTok Awards UK & Ireland next month, and she’s happy that gossipy history is being recognised as just as worthy as any other kind.
“Some people love battle and war history but I just… don’t really care about that,” she laughed. “When you learn about that stuff, it doesn’t feel very personal. When you learn about actual figures in history, and not just kings and queens, but regular people and their lives, I feel that’s what makes history interesting.
“But when we’re first introduced to history at school, you’re not going to learn about those personal stories. A teacher won’t tell you who Queen Victoria was having it off with. So, people walk away from it thinking, God, that was boring, but it’s really not.”
The History Gossip
So, what is Katie’s favourite piece of historical gossip? She said it had to be the disastrous marriage between King George IV and his wife Caroline of Brunswick.
“There was a rumour going around that Caroline didn’t wash herself or change her knickers much and, apparently, she absolutely stank. But they had to get married because she was a princess and they were related and, at the time, that was the only two things you needed really,” she quipped.
“By the time he was crowned King, they hated each other, and he banned her from the coronation. He had a mistress, she had an affair with Napoleon’s brother-in-law – there was so much drama.”
Gossip, even historical gossip, is often looked down upon as tawdry and mean-spirited, but it doesn’t have to be if done right, explained Katie. “People put it down all the time that it’s a silly woman thing. But as long as it’s not really nasty, I think it’s fine to have a little gossip.
“It bonds us and brings us together, and if people didn’t gossip in the past in letters and their diaries, then we wouldn’t have these interesting, juicy facts about people from the past.”
In fact, if we don’t gossip about the people of yore, we may risk being unable to understand them at all.
She added: “You see portraits of people from the 1600s and they look stuffy and boring. There’s a disconnect because they’re wearing different clothes and seem really serious, but when you get into it, they were someone.
“They liked people, they got embarrassed, they were sad sometimes, and other times they were happy. I think it’s important to present the whole map of history – that’s what allows us to understand others. We’re all just people, really – even people from the past.”
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