Browse Website Reviews

A curated guide to the best online content, large and small, in world history through website reviews from the perspective of a world history teacher.

Map Section Image Database

The Walker Collection comprises 135 maps, printed between 1511 and 1774, that cover Asia Minor and surrounding areas including the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Balkans.

Detail of Durer's "Last Supper" from his Passion series showing Jesus holding one of his disciples

While the responsibility of providing historical context for these images remains with the instructor, the images themselves will delight and puzzle students—and, if they are properly prepared, will provide good insight into the historical periods in question as well.

Image of a cow against a red backdrop from The Hague

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

A rich database site that focuses on iconography (pictorial illustrations of a subject) such as this one offers many teaching and learning possibilities for several humanities disciplines, not just art history.

1500s landscape drawing showing a bridge over a river looking on into a harbor

Biblioteca Ambrosiana

The site is visually attractive and well designed, with straightforward navigation. It provides an introduction to the site and a history of the collection; a database search that scans the collection by artist, subject, and other parameters; and bibliographies for the drawings, for the history of the Ambrosiana, and for various exhibitions.

International Dunhuang Project

The IDP, based at the British Library in London, is an international collaborative effort to catalog, conserve, and encourage research of Silk Road artifacts. This website, which currently displays around 20,000 digitized images of these artifacts, is one product of this larger effort.

A woman dressed in a kimono and hair in Japanese style sits in a room playing a shamisen. A tray with a tea set and a tobacco tray are placed next to her, and a screen is placed at her back.

Japanese Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period

The site will be useful to instructors looking to add visual sources to enliven a discussion of Japanese history at this critical moment in which Japan confronted the threat of Western imperialism and embarked on its own urgent project of modernization.

Detail of "The Priest Saigyo" a painting of an older man in a flowing black robe underneath Japanese text

Japanese Text Initiative

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this site is its search engine, which enables the reader to search multiple texts, in English, for common topics or phrases. This feature makes these literary texts very useful to historians locating references on specific topics.

Australian War Memorial

This website provides extensive information about the history of Australia at war, through primary and secondary material, as well as information about the memorial itself.

Detail: Black and white photograph of two girls in dresses standing in front of a tree

Abdul-Hamid II Collection Photography Archive

Teachers and students of the history of children and youth will be particularly taken by the vast array of education-themed photographs, which reveal a strong emphasis placed on schooling by the Ottoman Empire at the time.

1907 photograph of Peck Piano Company workers

Museum of the City of New York: Byron Collection

The Byron photographers took as its subjects all manner of social life in and around New York; the collection includes private subjects (family portraits and home photographs), but the bulk of the collection documents public life and public institutions.