But is there any history in the early past of it that this has ever happened?
No, Bitcoin has not had a 51% attack, as far as I'm aware.
If there's none, it only proves how secure and safe the network is even in the early days.
Comparing the risk and reward ratio, attempting such an attack on Bitcoin would be very difficult to pull of. For one, it has a huge capital requirement to even attempt it, and there's no guarantee that the attacker would actually get any benefit from it.
The hashrate is also growing, making it more difficult with time.
Yeah, a group or a company that will attempt to do this. They may not even get what they want and they'll cost them more money so it's nonsense to do it anymore, especially on these days when the price of bitcoin was 1/3 from its former highest ATH.
I guess we can conclude that it's highly unlikely that we'll see bitcoin drop to that figure.