75 History
Collections
Canada 150 Conference Proceedings: Migration of Bengalis 
(CC BY-NC)
The Canada 150 Conference on Migration of Bengalis was triggered by our academic as well as personal desires to establish broadly the history of migration of Bengalis or Bangla-speaking people to Canada. As long-time researchers on Asian immigrants in Canada, and through our involvement in the Metropolis Research Project, we realized that there was hardly any published material on Canadian Bengalis. Therefore, in 2017, on the eve of Canada’s 150th anniversary, we took the opportunity to celebrate and document the history and contemporary trends of Bengali immigrants in Canada.
Canadiana (Licences vary, see the copyright notice)
A digital repository containing historical Canadian primary material. Included are Canadiana Online, Early Canadiana Online, and Héritage. These collections include a wide collection of primary source material, including historical monographs, serials, and government publications.
Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource (Open source, licences vary)
Curated and edited by Tristan Grunow and Naoko Kato, the Meiji at 150 DTR is designed to present open-source scholarly content that will be useful for educators and academics looking for new images and topics to introduce into their classroom teaching, while highlighting the academic research possible using UBC’s digital materials. The Meiji at 150 Visual Essays pair digitized materials with historical narrative and interpretive analysis. The companion Digital Resources page collates all of the Japan-related digital collections at UBC into one convenient location to facilitate accessibility for research purposes and for easy adoption in the Japanese studies classroom.
OpenGLAM (Licences vary)
Collections from around the world that provide digital scans or photos of cultural heritage held by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
The Victorian Web (Licences vary)
A collection of primary and secondary materials (books, articles, images) in British Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts. Although the site concentrates on Great Britain in the age of Victoria (1837-1901), it includes much material before and after those years, particularly in sculpture and architecture, and the site also has a good deal of comparative material.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (CC BY-NC)
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The site also links to a number of web resources.
Monographs
Confronting Canadian Migration History (CC BY-SA)
A collection of essays that speak to the broad range of research being done in Canadian migration history; they also highlight the commitment of their authors to an engaged, public-facing scholarly practice. Read together, the authors believe they offer a much-needed historical perspective on contemporary Canadian debates around immigration and refuge, questions that cut to the heart of who we are as a society.
Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (CC BY)
Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The essays in this collection restore our understanding of the encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this, the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment.
Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150 (CC BY-NC-SA)
A companion volume to the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource that aims 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.
Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain (CC BY)
Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today.
Textbooks
American Environmental History (CC BY-SA)
This text surveys findings of the new field of environmental history about how the environment of the Americas influenced the actions of people here and how people affected their environments, from prehistory to the present.
American History I: Colonial Period to Civil War (CC BY)
This text contains all modular text content used in the LMS implementation of American History I (HIST 2111) courses. American History 1 covers topics ranging from the colonial period to the Civil War.
The American Yawp (CC BY-SA)
An open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses.
History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877 (CC BY-SA)
This textbook examines U.S. History from before European Contact through Reconstruction, while focusing on the people and their history.
Keys to Understanding the Middle East (CC BY-SA)
This book is intended for readers who have never studied the Middle East, or experts who may wish to fill gaps in their knowledge of the region from other disciplines. Whether for establishing or deepening one’s knowledge of the region, these fundamentals are important to know. The languages, cultural, religious and sectarian communities of the region, and selected turning points and influential people in history are starting points for gaining an understanding of the diverse contexts of the region.
Open History Seminar: Canadian History (CC BY-NC-SA)
This book brings together open resources for learning about Canadian history from the earliest times to the present. Chapters include both historical documents and secondary interpretations on a range of topics. With this book, students have access to digitized copies of original historical documents and high-quality secondary source research materials. They will learn how to critically analyze historical documents, deconstruct historical arguments, and engage with historical scholarship. This is a supplement to the open textbooks, Canadian History: Pre-Confederation and/or Canadian History: Post-Confederation.
Using Primary Sources (CC BY-NC-ND)
An archive-based open access e-textbook published by the University of Liverpool that provides students with an essential learning resource to study primary sources, comprising over 200,000 words and in excess of 200 original documents (photographs, maps, letters, audio recordings, diaries, pamphlets and newspapers) with 26 collections by leading academics in the field.
World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 (CC BY-SA)
An open textbook that introduces the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as 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.
Videos
Canadian History: Post-confederation (CC BY)
A collection of interviews with historians on different topics in Canadian history. (45 videos)
Canadian History: Pre-confederation (CC BY)
A collection of interviews with historians on different topics in Canadian history. (97 videos)
Centre for the History of the Book (CC BY)
A series of videos designed to introduce key skills for Book Historians. The videos provide guidance on how to handle rare books, how to tell a quarto from an octavo, how paper is made and where watermarks come from, how to read and write a collation, how to use a scholarly edition and more. These videos offer a useful resource for mastering research techniques that can be difficult to learn from a book.
Websites
Active History (CC BY-NC-SA)
A website that connects the work of historians with the wider public and the importance of the past to current events.
Civil War Washington (CC BY-NC-SA)
Civil War Washington allows users to study, visualize, and theorize the complex changes in the city of Washington, DC between 1860 and 1865 through a collection of datasets, images, texts, and maps.
Histories of the National Mall (CC BY)
This site contains a collection of historical maps, a chronology of past events, short bios of significant individuals, and episodes in the Mall’s history.
19th-Century France: A Visual Resource (Licence unspecified)
This site contains a collection of photographs and information about 19th-century French painting, architecture, fashion, and caricature.
NICHE Canada (CC BY-NC)
NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l’environnement is a Canadian-based confederation of researchers and educators who work at the intersection of nature and history. They explore the historical context of environmental matters and communicate their findings to researchers, policymakers, and the public.
O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family (CC BY-NC-SA)
A site documenting the challenge to slavery and the quest for freedom in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing freedom suits filed between 1800 and 1862, as well as tracking the multigenerational family networks they reveal.
