Open Educational Resources (OER): History

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).

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.

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.

This open course presents a comparative overview of world history from the 17th century to the present era. It examines the origins of major economic, political, social, cultural, and technological trends of the past 400 years and explore the impact of these trends on world societies.

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.

This open course covers some of the most important political revolutions that took place between the 17th century and today.

This project from the Library of Congress contains primary source documents and audio interviews with individuals who experienced major wars, from World War I to the Iraq War.

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