A People’s History of New York City This website, hosted at CUNY Academic Commons, was created by Samuel Finesurrey of Guttman Community College. The site “traces the history of NYC through the experiences of Immigrant and Migrant communities.” Resources include a section on “Black New Yorkers’ Struggle for Liberation” and guidance on conducting oral history interviews; if consent for distribution is secured, interviews may be added to the Guttman Community College Undergraduate Scholars Oral History Collection.
CUNY Dominican Studies Institute: Digital Resources These digital resources are provided by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York. These feature “various educational platforms to enhance teaching and learning on Dominican topics”; they are freely available, but check individual resources for information about permissions.
Open Books
Ancient World History to 1300 C.E. This textbook “explores the history of the world from prehistoric times to 1300 C.E., paying specific attention to the interconnections (or disconnections) between peoples and regions.” The first section is on the history of Africa.
The Bright Continent: African Art History “This book aims to act as your map through the world of African art. As such, it will help you define the competencies you need to develop–visual analysis, research, noting what information is critical, asking questions, and writing down your observations–and provide opportunities for you to practice these skills until you are proficient. It will also expose you to new art forms and the worlds that produced them, enriching your understanding and appreciation.”
History of International Relations: A Non-European Perspective “Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues.” A chapter on Africa gives an overview of the precolonial history of the continent with a focus on trade and migration.
AfroLatin@Project “Our mission is to serve as a resource center and cultural advocate for documentation and preservation of cultures, histories, and experiences of Afrodescendant people in the Americas and the Caribbean.” Unless otherwise stated, the content at the site is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Art & Life in Africa This website of freely accessible but not openly licensed materials is now available only in an archived version.
Caribbean Histories Revealed (The National Archives) “The history of the British Caribbean is explored in this exhibition through government documents, photographs and maps dating from the 17th century to the 1920s and discovered during a cataloguing project at The National Archives of the United Kingdom.” Unless otherwise stated, the content in this collection is available under the Open Government License v3.0.
Centre for Popular Memory at UCT Libraries Digital Collections The Centre for Popular Memory was “an oral history-based, research, advocacy and archival centre located in Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town”; this digital collection includes a selection from its repository of oral history interviews, “featuring first-person life histories, testimonies, memories and shared reflections in nine languages,” with full transcripts and translations. Check the rights of each individual resource before using it.
Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) “dLOC is a cooperative of Partners within the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections. […] Types of collections include but are not limited to: newspapers, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official documents, documentation and numeric data for ecosystems, scientific scholarship, historic and contemporary maps, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature and poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.” Check the rights on the resources in these collections before using them.
Liberated Africans “This website retraces the lives of over 250,000 people emancipated under global campaigns to abolish slavery, as well as thousands of officials, captains, crews, and guardians of a special class of people known as ‘Liberated Africans.'”
Transatlantic Slave Trade This set of primary sources from the Digital Public Library of America includes “documents, photographs, artwork, and maps that tell the story of the slave trade and its impact” and is accompanied by additional resources and a teaching guide.
World History Commons This site provides digitized and annotated primary sources along with teaching guides on topics in world history and on working with particular types of primary sources. Guides that may be of interest include the following:
