Download 78 Free Online History Courses: From Ancient Greece to The Modern World

History-Dielman

Per­haps the fore­most cliché about history—from a 1905 quote by George San­tayana—says that those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to make the same mis­takes. Philoso­pher G.W.F. Hegel, sound­ed a much more pes­simistic note in the 19th cen­tu­ry: “We learn from his­to­ry that we nev­er learn any­thing from his­to­ry.” Whether his­to­ry teach­es us to make bet­ter choic­es or sim­ply shows us how much mod­ern humans resem­ble the ancients, the study of the past can enthrall, enrage, inspire, and cap­ti­vate us all. And one demon­stra­ble mode of progress—technology—now allows us to for­mal­ly study all sorts of his­tor­i­cal peri­ods with­out the need for lengthy appli­ca­tion process­es or increas­ing­ly high tuition costs (not to men­tion all those pesky dead­lines and exams).

Thanks to the Inter­net and sev­er­al top-flight uni­ver­si­ties, one can, for exam­ple, take a free online course on “Med­i­cine and Pub­lic Health in Amer­i­can His­to­ry” from Notre Dame (Free Online Audio), “The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion Era, 1845–1877” from Yale (Free Online Video — Free iTunes Audio — Free iTunes Video — Course Mate­ri­als), or “The Rise and Fall of the Sec­ond Reich” from UC Berke­ley (Free iTunes Audio). Too spe­cial­ized? Why not take an intro course? You might start with Yale’s “Intro to Ancient Greek His­to­ry” (Free Online Video — Free iTunes Video — Free iTunes Audio — Course Mate­ri­als) then per­haps move on to Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty’s sur­vey “His­to­ry of the World to 1500 CE” (Free Online Video —  Free iTunes Video) or UVA’s “The Mod­ern World: Glob­al His­to­ry Since 1760” (Free iTune­sU iOS Course).

Tired of old dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives of dead white Euro­peans? Check out MIT’s “Asia in the Mod­ern World: Images & Rep­re­sen­ta­tions” (Free Online Video & Course Info), La Trobe Uni­ver­si­ty’s “Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nal His­to­ry” (Free iTunes Audio), Columbi­a’s “His­to­ry of Iran to the Safavid Peri­od” (Free iTunes Audio), or the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois’ “Rethink­ing the Black Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment” (Free Online Video). Grant­ed, many of these class­es have more in the way of instruc­tion­al mate­r­i­al than oth­ers, but all of them offer more or less rig­or­ous attempts to grap­ple with major his­tor­i­cal ques­tions. And who knows? Maybe, just maybe, mak­ing some sense of the past actu­al­ly can help us cre­ate a bet­ter future.

All of the class­es above, and over 70 more, can be found in our list of Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es. And don’t miss the tremen­dous num­ber of oth­er offer­ings on our mas­ter list of 1000 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties, which includes oth­er sub­jects like phi­los­o­phycom­put­er sci­encepsy­chol­o­gyphysicsreli­gion, and many more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Learn 47 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness


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