General Resources; Documents; Maps; Statistics

General Resources

BBC History Magazine: This site offers access to the BBC History magazine, to news, quizzes, blogs, special features, podcasts, and more.
Best of History Websites: Award-winning portal created for students, history educators, and general history enthusiasts. Here you’ll find sites, rated for usefulness and accuracy, that will help you study or teach a wide variety of topics and periods in History.
Current Value of Old Money: Links and a bibliography of sources that try to answer the question how much would a specified amount of money at a certain period of time be worth today?.
Early Modern Web: Guide to primary and secondary web resources about early modern Europe, circa 1500-1800.
GBH OpenVault: We provide online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station GBH. Covers several decades of material.
eHISTORY: Our collection of primary sources, documentary material, online books and reviews offers a window into the past for students and scholars of history.
Hip Hughes videos: HipHughes History is a series of upbeat, personable and educational lectures designed for students and lifelong learners. Videos primarily focus on US History and Politics but span across World History and general interest.
History.com: From the History Channel, a site with videos, articles, and images about the people and events that made history. Videos may also be found on the History Channel YouTube site.
The History Place: The History Place is a private, independent, Internet-only publication based in the Boston area that is not affiliated with any political group or organization. The Web site presents a fact-based, common sense approach in the presentation of the history of humanity, with great care given to accuracy.
HistoryPod videos: Daily short videos about ‘on this day’ events in history.
History Today: History Today is a magazine whose aim is simple: to bring serious history to a wide audience. It is based in London and published monthly….This website includes an archive of virtually every article published by History Today since it was founded in 1951.
Museum of the World: From the British Museum and the Google Cultural Institute, an interactive timeline of interconnected historical objects from all over the world. Click on them to view details.
Stuff You Missed in History Class: Podcast taking a look at history topics both light and serious. Topics have included Plessy vs. Ferguson, Bakelite, The Ghost Army, The Egg Nog Riot, and much more. Each episode includes a bibliography.Also available on iTunes and Facebook.
Sweet Search: Using the Web and Technology in Social Studies Class: Tips for web research, including selections of resources on a variety of social studies topics, all chosen especially for students
Smithsonian Magazine: Smithsonian magazine places a Smithsonian lens on the world, looking at the topics and subject matters researched, studied and exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution—science, history, art, popular culture and innovation—and chronicling them every day for our diverse readership.
TED: Ideas about History videos: A collection of TED Talks (and more) on the topic of History.
Voice of the Shuttle: Extensive set of links to humanities resources online.
World101: Understand the issues, forces, and actors that shape our world…. Through its entertaining, interactive story-telling, World101 makes complex international relations and foreign policy issues accessible to learners both inside and outside formal academic settings.
World History Encyclopedia: We want to make history engaging and compelling, inspiring our users and visitors to learn more. We reach the digital generation by sharing an array of historical topics and narratives through text, video, interactive features, and social media.
WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources: A frequently updated Internet directory of over 2000 annotated links to high-quality English-language resources for a wide range of international affairs, international relations, international studies, global studies, and global education topics. These sites are recommended for regular research use, and are carefully selected for their cost-free, authoritative, and reliable information and analysis.

Cartoons

Association of American Editorial Cartoonists: Includes current cartoons, cartoons by topic, cartoons by cartoonist, lessons, news related to editorial cartoons, Cartoons for the Classroom (with lesson plans) and more.
British Cartoon Archive: The BCA holds the artwork for over 200,000 British editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines.
The Cagle Post: Collection of topical and political cartoons, with archives going back several years, from cartoonist Daryl Cagle.
The Editorial Cartoons of J.N. “Ding” Darling: Collection from Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and conservationist from the first half of the 20th century.
Five Decades of Herblock: A collection of essays and cartoons from Washington Post political cartoonist Herb Block spanning the second half of the 20th century.
GoComics:Political Cartoons: Modern poltical cartoons organized by artist.
Library of Congress: Cartoon Drawings: The Cartoon Drawings filing series offers more than 9,000 original drawings for editorial cartoons, caricatures, and comic strips spanning the late 1700s to the present, primarily from 1880 to 1980.
Library of Congress: Cartoon Prints, American: This assemblage of more than 500 prints made in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encompasses several forms of political art.
Library of Congress: Political Cartoons and Public Debates: Annotated list of political cartoon sites online for both students and teachers from the Library of Congress.
Policial Cartoons.com: This is the biggest, searchable database of political cartoons, by the best editorial cartoonists in the world.
The Week: Cartoons: Selected recent political and editorial cartoons.

Documents, Speeches, Primary Sources

America in Class: Collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards — historical documents, literary texts, and works of art — thematically organized with notes and discussion questions.
American Presidency Project: This collection contains over 100,000 documents including speeches, addresses, proclamations, executive orders, chats, and press conferences given by U.S. Presidents.
American Rhetoric: This award-winning site includes text files, audio, video, and images in sections such as Online Speech Bank, Top 100 Speeches, Movie Speeches, Christian Rhetoric, Rhetoric of 9-11, Speech of the Week, and more.
The Avalon Project: Documents in law, history, and diplomacy browsable by name or searchable by keyword.
British Library Online Gallery: The Gallery includes maps, drawings, sheet music, bird songs, early wax cylinder recordings, and more.
British Pathé: Now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivalled in their historical and cultural significance. Also offers a British Pathé YouTube Channel.
Chronicling America: Search America’s historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. At the Library of Congress.
Citizen U Primary Source Nexus: Primary source resources and teaching ideas. Derived from Library of Congress sources and nicely arranged for ease of access.
C-Span videos: The Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed, making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource.
Digital Public Library of America: A single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others.
DPLA: Primary Source Sets: Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide.
DocsTeach: Access thousands of primary sources — letters, photographs, speeches, posters, maps, videos, and other document types — spanning the course of American history…. Borrow from an ever-expanding collection of document-based activities created by the National Archives, and teachers around the world.
Google Arts & Culture: Google Arts & Culture features content from over 1000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world’s treasures online.
govinfo: govinfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government. From the Government Printing Office.
Historical Text Archive: Hundreds of articles, dozens of books, and thousands of links to historical documents from American and world history.
History & Politics Out Loud: History & Politics Out Loud is a searchable archive of politically significant audio materials for scholars, teachers and students.
HistoryNet: Extensive links to archival historical information on the web.
The History Place – Great Speeches Collection: Transcripts of selected great speeches throughout history.
Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: A collection from Project Bartleby online.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project: Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly … for educational use. This extensive collection of documents and links is a great starting place for historical research of all sorts.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
American Memory at the Library of Congress: Hundreds of collections of digitized documents, photographs, audio, video, text, music, maps, and other materials..
Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse Sets: This page features items from the Library’s digital collections that are free to use and reuse…. Each set of content is based on a theme and is first featured on the Library’s home page.
Library of Congress: Prints & Photographs Online Catalog: Photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings from the Library of Congress.
National Archives (U.S.): Text, historical information, and facsimile images of U.S. documents, treaties, and speeches. Also includes large collections of images of American people, places, and events. Includes America’s Historical Documents and Presidential Libraries; video files are hosted on YouTube Videos. There’s also a helpful multi-search tool at National Archives Catalog.
StoryCorps: StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record one another’s stories in sound…
Voices of Democracy: The Voices of Democracy project is designed to promote the study of great speeches and public debates.
WGBH Open Vault: We provide online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH.
White House Briefing Room: Transcripts from the White House of addresses, statements, briefings, and press releases. More materials can be found in the White House YouTube Channel.
World Digital Library: Contains over 19,000 items about 193 countries over a span of 10,000 years.

Geography & Maps

Driving Directions

Bing Maps — Google Maps — HERE WeGo — MapQuest — Waze

Geography and Maps

Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States: Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas’s nearly 700 maps.
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania.
Euratlas Periodis Web – Maps to be Used for the History of Europe: Policical maps of Europe at one-hundred year intervals between 1 A.D. and 1700 A.D., plus maps of Rome and of Roman battles.
Geo History videos: This YouTube channels offers short map animation videos summarizing historical subjects in a neutral and comprehensive manner.
GETeach: GE Teach lets you compare two maps side-by-side. You can select from a variety of layer options, move, zoom in, and use drawing and measuring tools.
Google Earth: Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.
Library of Congress: Maps: Search, browse, or check out the Collections with Maps from the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress: Military Battles and Campaigns: Maps showing campaigns of major military conflicts including troop movements, defensive structures and groundworks, roads to and from sites of military engagements, campsites, and local buildings, topography and vegetation.
National Geographic Maps: All sorts of maps, both of the United States and the world.
The National Map: This includes orthoimagery (aerial photographs), elevation, geographic names, hydrography, boundaries, transportation, structures, and land cover. From the U.S. Geological Survey.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection: Tons of maps both current and historical.
Printable Maps: More than 638 free printable maps that you can download and print for free. Includes continents, countries, regions, and maps of all fifty of the United States, plus the District of Columbia. With both labeled and blank maps.
StoryMapJS: StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in our development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool.
The True Size Of …: Allows one to compare the true size of countries and regions without the distortions of flat map projections.
Why All World Maps Are Wrong (video): This video shows how mapping a sphere onto a flat surface always produces distortions of one kind or another no matter which projection is used.
World Atlas 2.0: This site is a window to thousands of datasets. Gazing through this ‘window’ you can see the data as it should be seen: through powerful visualisations like maps and charts. With over 12 million data points spanning 100 categories, find a dataset that interests you and analyse it using a suite of interactive charts.
World Population: An Interactive Experience: Timeline from 1 A.D. projecting to 2050 A.D., showing human population around the globe.

Geography Games

City Guesser: Can you guess what city you’re in? Take a look at these photos and see if you can figure it out.
Ducksters: Ducksters offs mapping games of the US and the world, plus geography related word search, crossword puzzle, and other games.
Geography Game: Choose a region and see if you can click on the proper area to identify each place.
GeoGuesser: Similar in concept to City Guesser, GeoGuessr is a geography game, in which you are dropped somewhere in the world in a street view panorama and your mission is to find clues and guess your location on the world map.
GeoQuiz: Name as many countries as you can think of to fill in the map.
Quizzity: Given the names of cities around the world, can you place them on the map?
Seterra: Seterra includes fun quizzes that help familiarize you with countries, capital cities, flags, rivers, lakes, and notable geological features. Includes dozens of games about U.S. and world places. Also available as a mobile app.
World Geography Games Online: World Geography Games brings entertaining, educational quiz games for kids, students, adults and seniors to test and improve your geographical knowledge.

Governments & Political Systems

Alternatives to Capitalism and Democracy

An overview of “alternatives to democracy” from the 2001 book The Economic History of the Twentieth Century.

Ancient Greek Philosophy

Aristotle : Aristotle: Politics — Aristotle’s Political Theory — Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle
Plato : Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic — Plato: Political Philosophy — The Republic by Plato

Constite

Check out Constitute to read, search, and compare the world’s constitutions!

Countries Compared by Government (NationMaster)

Field Listing (CIA World Factbook

Alphabetical lists showing the basic form of goverment in each country or territory around the world. Both sites include links to more detailed articles about each place.

The Five Most Common Political Systems Around the World

As you study political science, it can be helpful to understand some of the most common types of political systems from around the world. Includes brief descriptions of each type of system and common variants.

Global Integrity

Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity uses local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and accountability.

How the World Votes: 2019

In 2019, more people will vote than ever before. Nearly two billion voters in 50 countries around the world will head to the polls this year to elect their leaders. … Here’s how different voting systems work around the world:

News

BBC — CNN — The Independent — New York Times — Public Radio International — World Politics Review

Political Philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, liberty, justice and the enforcement of a legal code by authority. (Philosophy Basics). For further information, check out Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philosophy Basics, or the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.

Political Resources on the Net

Listings of political sites available on the Internet sorted by country, with links to Parties, Organizations, Governments, Media and more from all around the world.

University of Michigan Documents Center: Political Science

Find political science data, articles, encyclopedias, handbooks and information about quantitative and qualitative research methods along with information on writing dissertations, publishing, and non-traditional research methods like digital scholarship.

Wikipedia: Forms of Government / Government / Political Philosophy

General introductions with links.

World Statesmen

World Statesmen is an encyclopedia of nations, colonies, international and religious organizations, and other polities mostly since the year 1700. Country facts, maps, anthems, flags, links, and multiple indexes are included.

Holidays

General and Miscellaneous Holidays

Christmas and Advent

Easter and Lent

Halloween

Juneteenth

Memorial Day

Thanksgiving

Veterans Day

General and World Statistics

ChartsBin: ChartsBin is a web-based data visualization tool that will allow everyone to quickly and easily create rich interactive visualizations with their own data. Deals with maps and statistics.
Earth: A Graphic Look at the State of the World: Via maps and graphs, this site shows and compares information on such topics as global ecology, human conditions, energy supply, food production, pollution, warfare, and wealth.
Earth Clock: Estimates of current world statistics, including population, births, deaths, incidence of various diseases, global temperature, and other information.
Gapminder: Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank. Gapminder fights devastating misconceptions about global development…. [and] promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.
Google Public Data Explorer: Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data.
InfoPlease: World Statistics: Infoplease has compiled some useful statistics to help you out. Here you will find population, social, economic, health and political data on every country in the world.
Internet World Stats: Internet World Stats is an International website that features up to date world Internet Usage, Population Statistics, Social Media Stats and Internet Market Research Data, for over 243 individual countries and world regions.
Moody’s Analytics: We offer unique tools and best practices for measuring and managing risk through credit analysis, economic research, and financial risk strategy.
NationMaster: NationMaster is where stats come alive! We are a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations.
Our World in Data: Our World in Data is a non-profit website that brings together the data and research on the powerful, long-run trends reshaping our world: Through interactive data visualizations we show how the world has changed; by summarizing the scientific literature we explain why.
Population Pyramid.net: Shows interactive population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100, based on U.N. statistical data. These pyramids show the life expectancy for males and females in the selected year, and can be narrowed by region or country.
World Bank Open Data: Free and open access to global development data
World Data Atlas: World and regional statistics, national data, maps, rankings. Also offers a Chrome Extension.
World Development Indicators: World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank’s premier compilation of cross-country comparable data on development.
World Statistics.org: The world-statistics.org service provides access to various statistical data along with related features.
Worldometers: Worldometers shows estimated current numbers based on statistics and projections from the most reputable official organizations.

U.S. Statistics

Bureau of Justice – Statistics: Crime, law enforcement, and courts statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice
Bureau of Transportation Statistics: All sorts of information and statistics about transportation in the U.S., by car, train, plane, boat, and other means.
CDC: National Center for Health Statistics: Articles, data, and statistics about health and health care in the U.S.
Census.gov: People, business, geography… all sorts of facts and figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Includes 2020 Census — Explore Census Data — Facts for Features — Maps — Quick Facts and other features.
Census GPT: Natural-language search for census data for crime, demographics, income, education levels, and population in the USA.
Data.gov: The home of the U.S. Government’s open data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
FBI: Crime/Law Enforcement Stats: We regularly publish or contribute to a series of statistical crime reports and publications, detailing specific offenses and outlining trends that can help you better understand crime threats both nationally and locally.
InfoPlease: U.S. States Maps & Stats: Click a state in the map below to find facts, statistics, historical information, and more.
Measure of America: GDP tells us how the economy is doing. Measure of America tells us how people are doing. … Measure of America provides easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding well-being and opportunity in America and stimulating fact-based dialogue about issues we all care about: health, education, and living standards.
National Historical Geographic Information System: The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides easy access to summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files… Covers 1790 through the present.
Statista: United States – Statistics & Facts: Offers a variety of up-to-date facts on the United States.
Statistical Abstracts Series: Annual reports from 1878 through 2011 detailing statistics about the state of the U.S.
Today in History: Selected articles from the Library of Congress.
USA.gov: U.S. Facts and Figures: Learn about the United States, including American holidays, the American flag, and census data.
U.S. News: United States: Overview and rankings of the U.S. from ‘U.S. News & World Report’ magazine.