Vast amounts of historical data are available as free text. The text itself can be related in time just as the events. For direct reporting and communication in the same time-frame there will be little distance between the communication date and the event date. Historical documents on the other hand have a large distance between reporting and event date. We also expect that the linguistic expression for naming these events will be different; exhibiting high abstraction and others types of perspectives in historical reports as compared to actual news reports. A historical information system requires an innovative view on the semantics of events and the ways we can conceptualize these through language in different genres of documents.