History Research Guide

1. Open Educational Resources (OER)

• OER Commons: A comprehensive digital library of open educational resources, including textbooks and course materials for history.
• OpenStax: Offers free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks covering various history topics.

2. Online Courses and Lectures

• Coursera: Provides free access to many history courses from top universities. Auditing courses is often free.
• edX: Similar to Coursera, offering free courses on a wide range of history topics.
• MIT OpenCourseWare: Offers free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT's history courses.
• Khan Academy: Provides a variety of courses on world history, art history, and more.

3. Primary Sources and Digital Archives

• Library of Congress Digital Collections: A vast repository of digitized documents, photographs, maps, and more.
• National Archives: Offers access to a wealth of primary sources, including historical documents, images, and recordings.
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project: A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly for educational use.

4. Journals and Articles

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Contains free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals, including many focused on history.
• Google Scholar: A freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across various formats.

5. History Blogs and Websites

• History Today: Offers articles on a wide range of historical topics and periods.
• BBC History: Provides articles, podcasts, and more on historical events and figures.

6. Video Lectures and Documentaries

• YouTube - CrashCourse: Offers engaging and educational videos on world history and U.S. history.
• TED-Ed: Provides animated educational videos on various historical topics.

7. Interactive Resources and Simulations

• Digital History: Offers interactive modules, primary sources, and essays on American history.
• ChronoZoom: An interactive timeline for exploring history visually.

8. Historical Maps and Geospatial Data

• David Rumsey Map Collection: Offers high-resolution scans of historical maps.
• Old Maps Online: A search engine for historical maps.

9. Professional Organizations and Institutions

• American Historical Association (AHA): Offers resources, including publications and teaching materials.
• Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: Provides a wide range of resources, including primary sources, essays, and multimedia content.

10. Public History Projects and Oral Histories

• The American Memory Project: A rich digital collection of historical resources from the Library of Congress.
• StoryCorps: An oral history project that records and shares personal stories from across the United States.