LibGuides: Digital Primary and Secondary Sources: General Resources

History Open Educational Resources

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: Our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.
MIT Open Courseware- History
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the forerunners in open courseware, making "virtually all MIT course content" available online for public access.
Hippocampus- History and Government
Hippocampus offers educators a wide variety of multimedia content online, including videos, animations, and simulations. An additional feature offers educators the ability to create "playlists" for their students, which correlate specifically to their particular instruction material
Open Course Library- History
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
Europeana
Europeana.eu is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage. More than 3,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana. These range from major international names like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library and the Louvre to regional archives and local museums from every member of the European Union. Together, their assembled collections let users explore Europe's cultural and scientific heritage from prehistory to the modern day.
World Digital Library
The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.

General Online Resources

Archive.org
Online library includes digital forms of books, websites, music, games, and more. Also includes digital collections from many American and Canadian libraries and special collections
Digital Public Library of America
Provides access to digitized collections of archives, museums, libraries, and special collections in America.
Europeana
Provides access to digital collections from archives, museums, and special collections across Europe. Also includes a rotating gallery and digital exhibitions.
Lowcountry Digital Library
Digitized collections of local area repositories. Some collections of interest to those researching African American history.
Smithsonian Open Access
Smithsonian Open Access provides images of nearly three million objects in their collections, all of which are free to use. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Library of Congress Digital Collections: South Carolina
The state resource guide for digital collections at the library of congress with South Carolina-specific content.

General History Databases

Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
Encompasses diverse primary sources including 18th and 19th century newspapers, periodicals, American county histories, and more.
AM Explorer This link opens in a new window
Provides millions of pages of primary sources, spanning the 15th to 21st centuries, with various themes including Borders and Migrations, Gender and Sexuality, Global History and more.

ArchiveGrid
Primary source material held in archives, special collections, and manuscript collections worldwide. Historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. Also helps researchers contact archives to request information, arrange a visit, and order copies.
Archive of Americana
Searches Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans 1639-1800, Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker 1801-1819, and Early American Newspapers, Series I.

Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window
Includes primary source resources in the areas of African American studies, African studies, American and British history, military history, radical studies, LGBTQ+ studies, and more. For a complete list of the collections available to the College of Charleston, click the Browse Collections tab.
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Provides over 1.5 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences. Collections comprise contributions from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.
Gale Ebooks This link opens in a new window
Award-winning digital reference database includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. in the fields of biography, business, education, environment, history, law, current events, science and social science.
Biography Reference Bank (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new window
Wilsons largest biography database. Also includes full text articles, page images, and abstracts from the complete range of Wilson databases.
History Reference Center This link opens in a new window
A full text history reference database designed for secondary schools, public libraries, junior/community colleges and undergraduate research.

Digital Primary and Secondary Sources: General Resources

General Resources

History Open Educational Resources

General Online Resources

General History Databases

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