This paper starts with a a brief historical review of electrostatics. Then, the use of this historical knowledge is proposed in order to analyse students’ difficulties in learning this theory. This is done using proofs and empirical designs, employed mainly in the historical evolution, which are known as “natural” phenomena or facts, and examining what explanations are given by the students to these facts. Research findings seem to suggest that most of students’ interpretations of electrostatics phenomena present ideas about the electrical nature of matter that differ from the Newtonian theory and remind us of pre-Newtonian explicative models.