The author's aim is to compare academic and popularised articles in the field of history in order to answer the question 'why do we popularise history?', comparing narrative aspects in a small corpus of five texts form academic journals and a popular history magazine. In this article the author examines whether the difference between academic and popularised articles can be found in the way they make use of stories, i.e. to what extent academic and popularised articles in the field of history include story-like parts. The term 'story' in this article refers to all series of events that recapitulate past time events with human actors involved.