Open Education Resources (OER)

From Annenberg Media, this is a 26 part video series covering U.S history to the present. Each of the videos comes with a transcript, map, and webography.

This film archive allows the user to locate and download for preview film clips from the entire 3,500-hour British Pathe Film Archive which covers news, sport, social history, and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.

This site is an online companion to PBS' American Experience series Vietnam: A Television History.

This course covers the major economic, political, and social changes of this period.

This course "surveys the significant forces and people that have shaped American civilization since the Progressive Era to the present."

This site is a series of individual essays that discuss specific moments that altered American history. It covers 1735 to 1965.

This site breaks down U.S. history into a series of stories and events.

This is a free online course offered by UC Berkeley. Each of the 25 lectures can be downloaded from iTunes.

This is a free online course offered by UC Berkeley. Each of the 20 lectures can be downloaded from iTunes.

This is a free online course offered by UC Berkeley. The course consists of 23 lectures, each of which can be downloaded as a podcast from iTunes.

This site is a collection of speeches, treaties, letters, and maps organized chronologically.

Use this site's timeline 'slider' to move from era to era and bring up overviews, images, videos, and more for U.S. history.

This site contains images, documents, and authentic sound files beginning with the Civil war and continuing through the 9/11 attacks on America.

This site gives a timeline of the Cold War from the 1940s to the 1990s with links to important developments and people involved.

This quiz was developed by the Cold War Museum.

This site contains primary documents, posters, photographs, songs and other documents related to WWI

This site explores the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack on 9/11 with recorded stories of Japanese and Muslim U.S. citizens. Although the activities are geared to a younger audience, the glossary of Japanese and Muslim terminology and the maps and fact sheets along with the audio should be useful.

A module by Dr. James Ross-Nazzal.

A collection of modules by Dr. James Ross-Nazzal and David White, this textbook will examine US history from the pre-Colombian era to the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Covers all United States history.

Comprises a lengthy tutorial with all the advice and direction a college student could need.

This site presents a general overview of the nature of slavery in the southern United States, drawing upon actual documents, slave narratives, drawings, and photos. It is accompanied by links to related sites and includes a bibliography, timeline, and suggested classroom activities for teachers.

This Plymouth Colony Archive presents a collection of searchable texts, including court records, colony laws, 17th century texts, research and seminar analysis of various topics, biographical profiles of selected colonists, probate inventories, wills, maps, town and fort plans, architectural and material culture studies.

U.S. History covers the breadth of the chronological history of the United States and also provides the necessary depth to ensure the course is manageable for instructors and students alike. U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most courses. The authors introduce key forces and major developments that together form the American experience, with particular attention paid to considering issues of race, class, and gender. 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).

After Slavery is a transatlantic research collaboration between historians based in the US, Ireland and the UK. Directed from Queen's University Belfast and funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project's website offers a large collection of images and transcribed primary documents from dozens of archives across the US. Its 'Online Classroom' includes ten units on the aftermath of slave emancipation in the Carolinas:

CourseWorld is a free library of the web’s best educational videos in the arts and humanities. It features 16,000 videos indexed and keyword-tagged into more than 700 categories.

At the heart of the project is a five-part television series that shows how Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture -- from the Wampanoags of New England in the 1600s who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes, to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity. We Shall Remain represents an unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers and involves Native advisors and scholars at all levels of the project.

A video course consisting of 25 lectures by Yale professor Joanne Freeman.

A video course consisting of 27 lectures given by Yale professor David W. Blight.

The first in the introductory surveys of U.S. history. 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.

The second in the introductory surveys of U.S. history. 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.


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This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history.

"Crisis at Fort Sumter" is an interactive historical simulation and decision making program. Using text, images, and sound, it reconstructs the dilemmas of policy formation and decision making in the period between Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860 and the battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Users can select an overview of events that precipitated the battle, key events prior to the start of the action indicating both American and British actions, other resources such as biographies of key individuals, battle analysis, logistic support and more.

This web-based educational role-playing game simulates the experience of fugitive slaves in the American South before the U.S. Civil War. Users assume the persona of an actual historical figure, such as Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, and move about a map of the nineteenth-century United States as they are confronted with events taken from fugitive slave narratives.

An interactive site that has students browse reproductions of records and documents pertaining to two similar towns in Pennsylvania and Virginia just before and during the Civil War to determine for themselves how the issues of the day and events of everyday life. affected ordinary people

Based on a case of a tragic assassination of character in an 18th century New England town, this interactive site seeks to teach students how historians must piece fragmentray evidence together to reconstruct past events. It has them browse diaries, newspapers, and town records to decide for themselves what happened.

An exhibit of American and Japanese art illustrating Commodore Perry's mission to Japan in 1853-54. Weaves approximately 200 Japanese and American graphics together with an analytical text to demonstrate how each side depicted the other - and, indeed, how each depicted the same events. Comes with accompanying hand-outs and lessons.