Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) informed genre theory, this paper investigates the interplay between narrative and analytical representations of the past in texts used for history-educational purposes. In this paper, it is argued that the role of narrative merits further attention in history genre descriptions. Thirteen history texts, selected from a lower-secondary history-instructional unit about European colonization, are examined. The examination of stages, narrative elements, and the way historical significance is expressed in these texts arrives at a re-calibration of the historical recount genre suggesting four distinct "historical recount types" with different configurations of a narrative-analytical interplay. The findings have implications for our understanding of the role of narrative elements in history texts, and further for genre-based approaches to instruction that concern reading and writing history texts.