Open Books

• African American History
  This open textbook gives an overview of African American history from African origins and the transatlantic slave trade to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.
• The American LGBTQ Rights Movement: An Introduction
  “The American LGBTQ Rights Movement: An Introduction is a peer-reviewed chronological survey of the LGBTQ fight for equal rights from the turn of the 20th century to the early 21st century. Illustrated with historical photographs, the book beautifully reveals the heroic people and key events that shaped the American LGBTQ rights movement. The book includes personal narratives to capture the lived experience from each era, as well as details of essential organizations, texts, and court cases that defined LGBTQ activism and advocacy.”
• The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook
  This “free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses” authored by college-level instructors includes text, documents, media, and primary source guides.
• History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877
  “This textbook examines U.S. History from before European Contact through Reconstruction, while focusing on the people and their history.”
• Spectacles in the Roman World: A Sourcebook
  “This is a collection of primary sources on Roman games and spectacles in their various forms, created for a second-year undergraduate class on spectacles in Greece and Rome at the University of British Columbia. This book is intended for use in upper-level academic studies. Content Warning: The content of this book contains animal cruelty and animal death, blood, classism, death, sexual assault, violence, and other mature subject matter and potentially distressing material.”
• Voices of Virginia: An Auditory Primary Source Reader
  “Voices of Virginia pulls together stories from oral history collections from across decades and archives to create an all-audio source […] The ‘album’ is only two hours long, but contains dozens of short oral histories from eyewitnesses to key moments in American history, from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s.” While this resource focuses on Virginia, stories from eyewitnesses to the Jim Crow Era, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II could provide richness to courses in American history outside of the state.
• World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500
  “World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. […] It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India’s Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning.”

Open Courses

• African American History (Open Yale)
  “The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present” with a focus on “the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.”
• History Courses from MIT OpenCourseWareA variety of open history courses across time periods and geography.
• History Freely accessible syllabi and lectures from Open Yale history courses
  Courses in American and European history.

OER Sites

• American Memory Collections from the Library of Congress
  A variety of African American history collections. Additional collections can be found here.
• The Avalon Project – Major Document Collections
• Docs Teach (National Archives)
  List of historical document collections from Yale Law School. “Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy.”
• Equality Archive
  “Equality Archive is a reliable source for the history of sex and gender equality in the United States. It is a theater for history and social justice with the goal to provide a forum for curious people.” Original content is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.
• Perseus Digital Library (Tufts)
  Perseus’ “flagship collection … under development since 1987” that “covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world.”

Zero-cost Resources

• Art History on Khan Academy
• Free Teaching Materials from the Zinn Education Project
  List of teaching activities on various history lessons from a “people’s history” perspective. Downloads of PDFs are free, but require registration (also no-cost) on the website. Please note these teaching materials are not under a Creative Commons license.
• TED Ed History lessons
• U.S. History on Khan Academy

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.