Open Question: Will multiple domains for my ecommerce site hurt SEO?

I'm well aware that duplicate content and cloaking is bad... but... If I have an e-commerce website which sells widgets, is it bad to have several other domains that, for example, have a few articles that discuss the history of widgets and what widgets are which link back to the e-commerce site (all domains hosted on the same server/IP and by the same company). I'm wanting to separate this informative content from the-ecommerce site, yet link back to the e-commerce site where appropriate. Are the search engines going to cry about this?