Open Educational Resources (OER)

History

Book Collections & Textbooks

Repositories & Research

• National Library of Ireland Online Catalogue: Printed collections including journals, magazines, and government publications; manuscripts catalogued since 1990; visual collections including prints & drawings, and photos
• The Crisis: "Founded in 1910 as the house magazine of the NAACP and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis quickly became the most important voice of the African-American struggle for cultural identity and civic justice in the U.S." Many Public Domain images can be found within the volumes.
• American Indian Boarding School: uses primary sources to explore American Indian boarding schools; DPLA Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States; created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee [CC BY]
• World History Encyclopedia: founded in 2009; every submission to the encyclopedia is reviewed by an editorial team. [CC BY-NC].
• UNESCO Digital Library: African History Books & Articles: The UNESCO Digital Library is the repository of UNESCO’s institutional memory and a source of information on UNESCO activities (in education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture, and communication and information), with more than 350,000 documents dating back to 1945. It includes the collections of the UNESCO Library and several documentation centres in UNESCO’s Field Offices and Institutes, as well as the UNESCO Archives.
• History Monographs: open monographs.
• 400 Years of African American History Commission: a federally appointed committee, operating independently as established by the Secretary of the Department of the Interior and administered by the National Park Service.
• Berghahn CC-Licensed Journals: History: "Berghahn Journals is the journals division of Berghahn Books, an award-winning independent publisher of distinguished scholarly books and journals in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1994, our program, which includes close to 40 journals and over 125 new titles a year, spans Anthropology, Migration & Refugee Studies, Geography, History, and Film Studies."
• Open Access at The Met: The Met's Open Access initiative is made possible through the continued generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies and "all images of public-domain works in The Met collection are available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). So whether you're an artist or a designer, an educator or a student, a professional or a hobbyist, you now have more than 375,000 images of artworks from our collection to use, share, and remix—without restriction."
• Auschwitz Memorial and Museum Historical Collection: This digital collection houses “tens of thousands of objects of a special nature, special meaning, and special symbolism.” Includes images of objects connected with the life of prisoners in the camp and the SS garrison. "A unique collection of items connected with the suffering of the people deported to Auschwitz." 
• Records of the American Colonies: Published documents--legislation, court proceedings, records, correspondence, etc.--from the 13 original colonies and their predecessors.
• UBC Library's Open Collections: UBC Library acquires archival materials which document the economic, political, cultural, labour, and literary history of British Columbia and Canada, as well as the history of the University. Archival material which is born digital or digitized is included in Open Collections. Includes digital photos, books, newspapers, maps, videos, and theses. 
• HIS121 US History to Reconstruction: Explores events, trends, peoples, groups, cultures, ideas, and institutions in North America and United States history, including the multiple perspectives of gender, class, and ethnicity, between the period when Native American Indians were the sole inhabitants of North America, and the American Civil War. Materials have been librarian-curated from a variety of sources and vetted for content and alignment by subject matter experts.

Images

• Flickr Commons: The Commons is an initiative, begun in 2008, to increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. Material with "no known copyright restrictions" is contributed by a vast array of participating institutions from all over the world including: 1930s-40s in Color; Washington Area Spark's albums; Urban J. Kinet Collection; Roadside America, NYC-Philly Vintage Baseball, and more.
• Imperial War Museum (IWM) Flickr Collections: The Imperial War Museum Collections cover aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict involving Britain and the Commonwealth.

Videos

• Smarthistory Videos: Videos on art and cultural objects that range from the paleolithic to the present. Go inside museums and engages in conversations about how to interpret and understand the art you are viewing. CC BY-NC-SA license seen at end of each video
• Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies; Linguistics and Philosophy: video resources for an MIT course titled, Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies, an Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. Part of MIT OpenCourseWare
• TED Talks: History: A collection of TED Talks on the topic of History [CC BY-NC-ND, unless otherwise noted]
• Exploring the Medieval Manuscript Book: Dr Irene O’Daly (Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University) teaches her students about the contents and materiality of medieval manuscript books. [CC BY]

Find more historical OER content by visiting our Anthropology & Archaeology and Art & Architecture pages.