Open Educational Resources (OER)

The American Yawp offers a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. It is currently being used in ISU history courses and has been praised for its clear and concise coverage of content.

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).

A textbook composed of primary sources interspersed with commentary and introductions produced by students studying early American history & literature, the Anthology of Earlier American Literature covers a timeline from before the Spanish set foot on the mainland to when Mark Twain wrote about his "America," roughly 1600-1850.

An introductory examination of cultural appropriation in the fine arts and popular arts of the United States, with reference to historical, literary, and other cultural developments.

It is important to learn about the history and heritage of African Americans that extends back into antiquity because throughout slavery and afterwards, people of European descent advanced what anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits called the “Myths of the Negro Past. (Drake 1990:1–14).” These myths were advanced particularly and primarily about African Americans as rationales to justify slavery, and later discrimination and segregation.

This project from Duke University contains over 400 oral history interviews chronicling African-American life from the 1890s to the 1950s.

A comprehensive survey of American Environmental History covering the exodus and evolution of homo sapiens to food production and transportation in modern day.

This book aims to examine the current state of systemic racism in the United States as compared to baseline data collected in 1969. Using recent findings in the fields of history, economics, education, political science and public health, the work reveals the ways in which systemic racism in the US has and has not been addressed in the past five decades.

This is an edited collection of original scholarship. The textbook offers an interdisciplinary perspective and is ideal for introductory classes in Appalachian Studies.

This is the textbook for an undergraduate survey course taught at all the universities and most of the colleges in the Minnesota State system. Similar courses are taught at institutions around the United States and the world, so the authors have made the text available as an open educational resource that teachers and learners can read, adapt, and reuse to meet their needs.

World History, Volume 1: to 1500 is designed to meet the scope and sequence of a world history course to 1500 offered at both two-year and four-year institutions. Suitable for both majors and non majors World History, Volume 1: to 1500 introduces students to a global perspective of history couched in an engaging narrative.

This book is designed to cover world history from 1500 to the present. It serves to weave insights from many perspectives into stories and narratives that will help students develop a framework to organize and connect ideas, geographical locations, and timelines allowing them to think critically and broadly about the world around them.

World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. It covers 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.

The primary text for this course is World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500. In addition to the OER textbook, you will find a variety of resources that you can adopt and adapt for your class. These include: Recommended course calendar and aligned textbook sections PowerPoint presentations Course documents (primary and secondary sources which correspond to each module) Question banks (for quizzes or exams) Discussion Board prompts (that pull on course documents).

In his Introduction, the author explicitly sets out the aims and concerns of the work: it is not motivated by an attempt to be politically correct, but wishes to, ‘straightforwardly, provide the kind of information you need in order to understand today’s world.’ The frankness with which Ringmar communicates this intent is maintained throughout the book. From colonisation and erasure to the Kama Sutra, there is no ground he is unwilling to cover if it is relevant to his unique dissection of IR.

Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience.

Learn what it means to think like an historian! Units on “Thinking Historically,” “Reading Historically,” “Researching Historically,” and “Writing Historically” describe the essential skills of the discipline of history.

The Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource and this companion volume were designed to present and widely disseminate research on the Meiji Period in a public format designed for easy adoption in the Japanese studies classroom. By pairing digitized materials and documents with historical narrative and interpretive analysis, the “visual essays” contained within encourage readers to review and rethink modern Japanese history through images.

This is the second edition of the open access textbook that arose out of a course at the University of California, San Diego, called HILD 10: East Asia: The Great Tradition. The course covers China, Japan, and Korea from roughly 1200 BC to about AD 1200.