The phrase "a dark history of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a troubling or negative past associated with a person, organization, or event.
Example: "The museum's exhibit focuses on a dark history of colonialism and its lasting impacts on indigenous cultures."
Alternatives: "a troubling past of" or "a sinister background of".
The US owns a dark history of blood, evil and oppression.
The land of Pinochet has a dark history of polarisation: left against right, poor against rich, government against people.
The law was enacted as a reaction to a dark history of abusive child welfare practices and was meant to preserve distinct aspects of American Indian culture.
The federal law was a reaction to a dark history of abusive child welfare practices involving Indian children and was sensitive to distinctive aspects of Native American culture.
Their fragile familial harmony shatters when Sheri's estranged father attempts to befriend Caitlin and indirectly revives a dark history of abuse.
It implies a dark history of failure — three duds (in Gregory's apartment) that the brothers now refer to as negative three, negative two, and negative one.
Sebald was an inheritor of a dark history, interested in the shame of the progeny.
Someday someone will write a dark history — a farce, really — of how he managed to bring nearly all of the Republican Party to heel, compelling legislator upon legislator to lash themselves to his no-new-taxes pledge.
But it is also true that he targeted the LGBT community, and thus his crime was an act of anti-gay hate in line with a long, dark history of such outrages in America, such as the 1973 arson attack on the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans.
"There is growing frustration about the UK government's increasingly visible support for Bahrain; [It] has a long, dark history of enabling state violence in Bahrain and protecting both British and Bahraini officials responsible," said John Horne of Bahrain Watch.
Even so, some prominent artists and writers, cognizant of a long, dark history of repression that Russians know only too well, and especially wary of the grip the church is gaining on the state, have been expressing deep anxiety about the government's starting to encroach on artistic freedom the way it has taken on other aspects of society.
