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.
Thumbnail image of Book of Hours of Marguerite d'Orléans

Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The site promises a look at the relation between image and power, from the time of Charlemagne to the time of Charles de Gaulle.
Detail: 1592 letter to Don Pedro Verastigui

Letters of Philip II, King of Spain, 1592-1597

The letters, grouped by the year in which they were written, are offered in a clear, readable facsimile.
Graph showing the mean price of enslaved people by their origin

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820

The Slave Database offers information on more than 100,000 slaves and the Free Database has records on more than 4,000 slave manumissions.
Photograph of Li Zhensheng with his camera in 1965

Red-Color News Soldier — Li Zhensheng: A Chinese Photographer's Odyssey through the Cultural Revolution

The entire project is particularly noteworthy for the beauty of its production, its strict adherence to a chronological framework, and a staunch commitment to precise and accurate captioning backed up by additional research and verification.
Detail of a print showing a market place titled "Un an en Malaisie" from 1889/1890

Southeast Asia Visions Collection

The range of sources and their ready accessibility also provides valuable material for work on diverse Southeast Asia topics related to local, regional, and global history.
Fishing junks under sail off the Shandong coast

The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946

The Morrison collection is nevertheless a rich and accessible one that will nicely serve the dual themes of visual culture and childhood—among many others—for studies of early-to-mid 20th century China.
Detail: A painting titled "Moment of Tearing" by Ryuji Ishitani showing a person ducking in cover in a flash of light

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

The historical material that is presented from multiple angles carefully allows the material to speak for the catastrophe and reconstruction.
Detail of an engraving titled "Tabulae Sceleti e Musculorum Corpis Humani" showing a skeleton with an angel

Dream Anatomy

This site, developed as part of an exhibit, remains a valuable online source for the study of the history of anatomy.
Detail: Map of Taiwan

Taiwan Documents Project

This site seems most valuable not as an unbiased repository of information, but rather as part of the movement for Taiwanese independence and more generally as a historical case study in the politics of national identity.
A 1909 map of India

Digital South Asia Library

The information and source materials presented on this site are extremely wide ranging, rare, and occasionally quite specific. Given the amount of content, this specificity should be seen as an asset rather than a drawback.

Pages