History Matters is (among other things of the same name) a video channel of charming and funny animated cartoons that teach serious history. Mostly about three to five minutes long, they cover every aspect of history ancient or modern, often answering the question 'Why?'
The drawing style is uniform: people (many of them recognizable, such as Trotsky or Henry VIII, others generic for their profession, period and country) are squat little bundles facing the front, with expressively slitty eyes when they don't like something (e.g. the current king, an unfair treaty, being treated like slaves), and they might hold up a sign to express a succinct opinion (such as 'You suck', which usually expresses a desire for change of government, or 'Soon', which is a threat that we're out to get you). They move by a kind of sideways waddling, unless they're sneaking into shot leaning at an angle. (The creator is a historian, not an animator.)
Occasionally one might have a reason to be joyous, and then they are shown bounding through a field of daisies. When they die, on the other hand, they keel over sideways with an audible thump.
There are quick flashes of a blackboard, which might contain just a connective like 'However'; or one of the characters might be pointing at it with a stick to indicate their thoughts or plans or decrees. If there's a flash of a larger amount of text like a scroll or a newspaper, gone before you can read it, always go back, pause on it, and read it all. It's always worth it. Another repeated trope is when the narrator says that at this point you might expect the Romans/Scots/Arabs/Politburo to do such and such, but 'Fun Fact: No'.
The maps are highly accurate. They might only be seen for a couple of seconds, but he has carefully coloured in the precise extent of, say, the Holy Roman Empire in 1648. Cartoon fires indicate conflict. By the nature of it, there are often fires all over the map.
The creator is a young man who narrates calmly over all this, and at the end he reads out his list of supporters (which always begins with one James Bissonette, a mysterious figure who has become something of a legend among the channel's followers). He has 377 videos at the time of writing this, and the earliest ones were ten minutes long so the channel was at first called Ten Minute History.