Help us improve these Open Access and OER resources for history. If you see something missing or you think should be added to the collection, or have any problems with the links please email jeff.benedetti-coomber@csuci.edu.
History Resources
Textbooks
The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses.
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) an OER search database with textbooks, courses and more. It is being developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library. You can conduct a basic search or search by subject. Like all of these OASIS is constantly being added to.
Boundless provides two textbooks: US History and World History.
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
Both a collection of open access publications and a publishing platform with a focus on social sciences and humanities.
OER Commons provides a curated collection of history textbooks.
UK publishing imprint that provides free online access and low cost formatted and print access to titles with a special emphasis on humanities, digital humanities, and social sciences.
Find textbooks, lessons, and other print materials for teaching history.
A database of OER textbooks of various subjects and different creative commons licenses. Run through the University of Minnesota with over 1600 textbooks to look through. Open Textbook Library is constantly updated with new materials and editions being added regularly.
The BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Guide lists a wide range of open educational resources, including textbooks and courses, organized by discipline.
Independence Hall Association provides a series of three textbooks including: American History, American Government, and Ancient Civilizations as well as historic documents, people, places, and resources for teachers and students.
Courses and Videos
Providing online history courses and guides for students to access and learn for their own enjoyment and educational purposes.
Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from the world’s best universities and educational institutions. Courses include recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer-reviewed assignments, and community discussion forums.
The Crash Course team has produced more than 32 courses on a wide variety of subjects, including organic chemistry, literature, world history, biology, philosophy, theater, ecology, and many more!
Explore important events from ancient to modern times with online history courses from leading universities and cultural institutions.
The course 'World War and Society in the Twentieth Century: World War II' is a thematic exploration of the war and its time through feature films, primary sources, and scholarly interpretations.
MIT Open Courseware offers an extensive series of online courses. Courses generally include lecture videos, assignments, exams, and more.
Get free History courses online from the world’s leading universities. You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.
Search for free history courses, inter-actives, videos and more.
The Yale Department of History encompasses the histories of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America.
Collection of PDF versions of textbooks on various topics. HTML versions are also available.
Create and share lessons around any TED-Ed original, TED Talk or YouTube Video.
A collection of educational videos posted on YouTube. Remember to pay careful attention to who is creating the content. Not every playlist is from a university or a verified channel.
Additional Resources
The activists interviewed for this project belong to a wide range of occupations, including lawyers, judges, doctors, farmers, journalists, professors, and musicians, among others. The video recordings of their recollections cover a wide variety of topics within the civil rights movement, such as the influence of the labor movement, nonviolence and self-defense, religious faith, music, and the experiences of young activists.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Exhibitions are designed to tell stories of national significance using source materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, including letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more.
The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
History Net contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in History Net's various magazines.
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom.
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Uses images and audio to help memorize vocabulary. Interactive site that saves individual progress.
The National Geographic online website and resource.
Provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
The Digital Edition of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin serves text of published papers and unverified transcriptions of unpublished material.
Perseus 19th Century American collection provides a list of historic documents, records, photographs, and other resources that can be used to study history.
The Miller Center provides information on the institution of the presidency, including in-depth reference essays, the Secret White House Tapes, presidential oral histories, and rich archival material such as rare audio and video of speeches.
Project Gutenberg offers over 56,000 eBooks in the public domain that are available freely online.
Project Gutenberg provides a collection of books on wars such as The American Revolutionary War, The Spanish American War, US Civil War, Boer War, World War I, and World War II.
The September 11, 2001 Documentary Project captures the reactions, eyewitness accounts, and diverse opinions of Americans and others in the months that followed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93.
Open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data.
Former Slaves Tell Their Stories. The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states.
Hosted by the Wikimedia foundation, Wikibooks is an open content textbook collection spanning a variety of reading levels and disciplines.