Ancient & Medieval History

The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. Unchecked by profit motives or business models, and free from for-profit educational organizations, The American Yawp is by scholars, for scholars. All contributors - experienced college-level instructors - volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.

This textbook examines U.S. History from before European Contact through Reconstruction, while focusing on the people and their history.
Prior to its publication, History in the Making underwent a rigorous double blind peer review, a process that involved over thirty scholars who reviewed the materially carefully, objectively, and candidly in order to ensure not only its scholarly integrity but also its high standard of quality.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. 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.

Topics covered include prehistory and ancient history by region, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.

The Open Textbook Library is a collection of open textbooks that features reviews written by professors. A project of the University of Minnesota, The Open Textbook Library provides a review rubric for faculty to use when evaluating textbooks and displays them for the benefit of potential adopters.

MERLOT is a collection of online resources curated by a community of faculty, staff, and students of higher education. This subset of the MERLOT collection features openly licensed textbooks for use by students and faculty. MERLOT allows its users to rate materials and comment on specific resources.

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

The OER Commons is a single search source that pulls from multiple OER collections, including MERLOT and Connexions. It is a great first step in an OER search, but often more results can be found by searching the specific collection. This collection is recommended for OER searches for History because it includes content from the Library of Congress, American History Project, History Matters, and the WGBH Open Vault.

MERLOT is a collection of online resources curated by a community of faculty, staff, and students of higher education. This subset of the MERLOT collection features openly licensed textbooks for use by students and faculty. MERLOT allows its users to rate materials and comment on specific resources.

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. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. The copyright status of items in the DPLA varies. Many items are in the public domain. For individual rights information, please check the Rights field in the metadata or follow the link to the digital object on the content provider’s website for more information.

The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. The focus is on works which have now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction.

The MIT History Faculty offers about 70 subjects in the areas of Ancient, North American, European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern history.

The Department of History is home to one of the most popular majors on the Yale campus and encompasses the histories of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Courses range in focus from the earliest recorded historical periods up through the modern day. Students are required to study history from a variety of geographical, chronological, and methodological perspectives, utilizing source materials wherever possible. The department also houses the History of Medicine and Science major.

Produced by The Open University, a world leader in open and distance learning, all OpenLearn courses are free to study.

Saylor Academy is a non-profit organization sponsored by the Saylor Foundation focused on bringing "freely available education to all." Founded in 1999 by Michael Saylor, they have created online courses curated from open content found on the Web. The courses are marketed toward students who just want to learn, and are working on some methods for offering credentials.

This course is a thematic exploration of the war and its time through feature films, primary sources, and scholarly interpretations. It seeks to provide a means for analyzing and evaluating what one reads or sees about World War II in terms of historical accuracy and for gaining a broader understanding of different perspectives.

Get 1,300 free online courses from the world's leading universities -- Stanford, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford and more. You can download these audio & video courses (often from iTunes, YouTube, or university web sites) straight to your computer or mp3 player.

This course covers the period from “early civilized man to the early Middle Ages of Europe, with emphasis on Greece, Rome, Egypt and other Mediterranean peoples.

This course begins with a look at pre-historical societies, including early urban settlements, moving through the early histories of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, to a consideration of Hebrew, Greek, Roman and early Christian history. The Celts will be examined and then a study of the barbarian societies that helped cau

After exploring North America before the arrival of Europeans, we study the early interactions of Europeans with indigenous peoples and as the course progresses confine our study to the history of peoples in the area now defined by the United States’ borders.

We begin in that decade when the United States in three years (1845-48) grew by 50 percent. Through the Civil War to the 20th century, we explore how different people experienced the transformation of the country into an industrial nation and emerging world power.

This course surveys the significant forces and people that have shaped American civilization from the Progressive Era to the present. Thus we begin at the start of the 20th century and we explore how different people, including you, participated in the nation’s transformation through that century until today.