Research guides: Teaching K-12 History with Online Primary Documents: World History from the 15th Century to the Present

World History (Open Access)

Frontier Life
A collection of primary materials documenting anglophone colonial expansion from 1650-1920. Various materials (largely anglophone-created) related to relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples around the world can be found under the Indigenous Peoples filter.
Google Arts and Culture
Various museum holdings from around the world have been digitized in partnership with Google, creating a free international resource with visual materials from a number of historical periods. For classroom teaching, searching under Historical Events may help to focus your results.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
The Internet History Sourcebooks are collections of historical texts for educational use covering large eras of global human history.
Let Them Speak: An Anthology of Holocaust Testimonies
Let Them Speak is a large scale digital project and anthology of nearly 3000 Holocaust testimonies published by Yale Fortunoff Archive. The project was developed through a joint effort by three institutions: Yale Fortunoff Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USC Shoah Foundation, bringing together testimonies from their individual collections. This digital archive is a powerful and useful resource for educators, researchers and students seeking to navigate a large body of testimonies that document the Holocaust from the victims' perspective.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lesson Plans
A number of activities related to museum holdings from various historical places and periods are outlined for educators on this site, including many images of artifacts and paintings.
USC Shoah Foundation: Visual History Archive Online
Free registration is required to access this archive of video testimonials of first-hand witnesses of genocide. Testimonials on the site come from survivors of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence.
The World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) displays significant primary materials from 193 countries and cultures around the world and shares them freely in a multilingual format. Sources include artifacts, images, and documents from 8000 BCE to 2000 CE with accompanying contextual information. It is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress supported by UNESCO, run in cooperation with many international libraries, institutions, and organizations.

World History (Licensed)

Empire Online
Empire Online features a wide variety of material about colonial history, politics, culture and society, including exploration journals and logs, letter books and correspondence, diaries, official government papers, missionary papers, travel writing, slave papers, and more.
Age of Exploration
A multi-sourced archive of letters, first-hand accounts, ship logs, maps, and other illustrated materials tied to global exploration from 1410-1999. The collection also includes audio-visual materials from the British Film Institute and the Explorers Club, including a selection of speeches and films relating to the Arctic and Antarctic explorers of the early-twentieth century.
Service Newspapers of World War Two
This database is home to over two hundred titles in multiple languages from key countries that participated in World War II.

Africa and the Middle East (Open Access)

Art and Life in Africa
A website created by the University of Iowa featuring images of art, artifacts, and architecture with contextualizing historical information.
Ross Archive of African Images
A searchable database of images of figurative African art and artifacts dating from 1590-1920.
The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960
A collection of photographs depicting life in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960. See Winterton in the Classroom for additional teaching resources related to this collection.
Digital Innovation South Africa
A free, scholarly resource containing primary and secondary sources related to South Africa’s history and the struggle for freedom during apartheid between 1950 and 1994. Includes written and visual resources.
Aga Khan Museum Teacher’s Resources
For a multidisciplinary approach to teaching grades 1-8 that incorporates Muslim history, download the PDF filled with suggestions for teaching using the Aga Khan’s collections, developed to meet Ontario curriculum guidelines. See especially Section 3: Learning with Aga Khan Museum Resources, which features lessons incorporating primary sources, like paintings and artifacts.
Islamic Heritage Project
Digitized written and visual documents related to the Islamic history of various nations and civilizations from the fifth to the twentieth centuries, compiled by Harvard University.
The American University in Cairo Digital Collections
The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.

The Americas (Open Access)

Our Americas Archive Partnership
This digital archive provides open access to historical documents on the Americas, supported by Rice University, the University of Maryland, and the Instituto Mora. For classroom use and support, see their Educational Materials for essays and relevant contextual information to aid in teaching with their primary sources.
Early Americas Digital Archive
Created by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), this open access archive includes historical materials from 1492-1820 related to the Americas. All resources are transcriptions of primary textual documents.
The Digital Library of the Caribbean
This online collection brings together open access primary resources related to the history of the Caribbean, including newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, travel accounts, literature, poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.

The Americas (Licensed)

Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice
This resource on trans-Atlantic slavery and abolition brings together original manuscripts and rare printed material from dozens of libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. In addition, there are many secondary sources for research and teaching including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
This massive archive is home to over 5.4 million searchable pages; University of Toronto students and staff are able to access all four subject-divided sections of the site with content relevant to the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Each item in the archive is accompanied by a brief contextual description.

Asia (Open Access)

Freer Sackler Digital Collections
Search through Asian art and artifacts from the complete digitized collections of the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Freer Study Collection.
The East Asian Collection from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries
This is a visual archive of 20th century East Asian cultural heritage. Currently, the collection consists of images that document early 20th century China including the the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), a visual history of Buddhist practices and temples in China, and other images of daily life in both rural and urban China.

Asia (Licensed)

Digital South Asia Library
This University of Chicago project collects images, maps, documents, statistics, bibliographies, and more related to the history of South Asia.

Australia and Oceania (Open Access)

National Library of Australia Pictures Collection
Includes images dating from the early European exploration of the South Pacific to photos of twentieth-century Australia.
University of Auckland, New Zealand Digital Collections
These collections include visual, written, and auditory primary resources related to the history of New Zealand and Maori culture.
AIATSIS Collections Online
This collection of resources from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies includes newspapers, images, and other primary resources related to mostly nineteenth and twentieth century Indigenous Australian history.

Europe (Open Access)

European History Primary Sources
An index of scholarly websites that offer online access to digitized primary sources on the history of Europe.
EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History
European primary documents that have been transcribed, reproduced, or translated into English.
Internet History Sourcebook: The French Revolution
A large collection of primary documents related to the French Revolution.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
Using texts, images, and maps, this resource serves as an introduction to the French Revolution.
British History Online
This site is a digital library focusing on the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.
National Library of Scotland Digital Resources
The National Library of Scotland has digitized a number of image and text-based primary documents from their collections. Many, but not all items are open access.

Europe (Licensed)

The Grand Tour, 1550-1850
A unique collection of primary and secondary sources, including letters, diaries and journals, and account books from travellers journeying through Europe during this period.

Teaching K-12 History with Online Primary Documents

World History (Open Access)

World History (Licensed)

Africa and the Middle East (Open Access)

The Americas (Open Access)

The Americas (Licensed)

Asia (Open Access)

Asia (Licensed)

Australia and Oceania (Open Access)

Europe (Open Access)

Europe (Licensed)

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