Drupal Best Practice for related content?

I'm trying to do a reasonably funky presentation and I don't know why, but I can't get my head around pieces of this.

The scenario: pretty simple I think.

Say the user goes to a page. We'll call it History.

When they're on that page, I want to display the Main information for this content. In another block, I want to display a list of related history links. In another block, I may want a random history tip. All would be related to the main item : history.

I'm looking for a little guidance on this before I get going too far in to something that the system supports in a way slicker fashion. All of the presentation is done with xhtml/css.

Thank you for your help :)