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.
Photograph of a Goudiry Woman and Children

Africa Online Digital Library

The site’s stated goal is the implementation of emerging best practices in the “American digital library community” in an African context, and it does not disappoint. Indeed, the site demonstrates a rare combination of scholarly sophistication, ease of use, and broad appeal.
Image of a compass taken on the Burke and Wills expedition

Burke and Wills – Terra Incognita

Supplementary material is easy to follow and fairly extensive... Information is included on the background to the expedition, its historical context, biographies of those involved, the preparation for and events of the expedition, and its aftermath.
Detail: 1500s map of Asia Minor

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

Wetmore Print Collection

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.
Logo and name for the International Dunhuang Project

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

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.

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