The beginning is a very delicate time for understanding. Concepts are better understood when the student knows the historic perspective. Their minds apprehend the evolution of knowledge and, to some extent, share fundamental discoveries. Students will not understand, for example, the actual model of the structure of an atom if they do not understand first the models proposed by Thomson and Bohr. However, due to the high number of research papers that are nowadays published, sometimes researchers forget to review some of the old papers in which the basis of knowledge were established, and those bases allow to build new achievements, allow to understand where are we, and where are we going. In this context, the main objective of the this article is to present the basis of knowledge regarding supported vanadium oxide catalysts, with an historical point of view. It presents how the main achievements were described in this field, and to do that, the literature century has been reviewed, and especially the progress in the 1980s and 1990s, since the influence of synthesis method and oxide support, the structure of the active phases, and the concept of monolayer were established in those years. The final part of this paper briefly presents the evolution of knowledge that has taken place during the past decade in this field, and some future trends are anticipated. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.