Free Educational Web Resources

• Authorama
  • This site provides many important public domain texts in a free, easy-to-read format.
• Bartelby
  • A strong collection of classic American and English Literature. Notably includes the Harvard Classics and the Oxford Shakespeare.
• Electronic Text Center Collections
  • Organized by the University of Virginia, this collection features 70,000 electronic texts, ranging across many topics and languages. This collection holds a great deal of texts from the American and English literary tradition (poetry, essays, fiction etc.). The Modern English collection is particularly robust.
• Episteme Links – Philosophy e-texts
  • From this site, you can search by name for texts written by individual philosophers, and the site will then point you to them.
• European Literature
  • This site will conveniently direct you to collections of literary e-texts from different European countries.
• Google Book Search
  • Once fully developed, Book Search will ideally let users search the world of print text and help them discover new books and ideas. You might particularly want to check out the area dedicated to Shakespeare.
• Google Scholar
  • Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. You can get more information about the scope of the product here.
• HighWire Press
  • The same idea as Google Scholar above. Actually much of HighWire’s content is contributed directly to Scholar’s content collection. So you can access HW material in essentially two places.
• Internet History Sourcebooks Projects
  • You’ll find here a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly for educational use.  It’s divided into three areas:
    • Modern History
    • Medieval History
    • Ancient History
• Live Academic Search (Microsoft)
  • 
    Windows Live Academic Search is Microsoft’s version of Google Scholar.
• Making of America
  • Assembled by the University of Michigan, this site offers a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection currently contains approximately 9,500 books and 50,000 journal articles.
• Online Books Page
• Oxford Text Archive
  • The OTA works closely with members of the Arts and Humanities academic community to collect, catalogue, and preserve high-quality electronic texts for research and teaching. It’s an extremely rich collection, ranging from ancient texts to modern.
• Perseus Digital Library
  • A database offering access to over 600 primary and secondary texts focusing on the Classical World. Here, you’ll find Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, among other works.
• Philosophy on eServer
  • Another site that offers access to canonical philosophical texts, from Aristotle to Derrida.
• Project Gutenberg
  • Contains 19,000 free books in full text.
• The New York Times First  Chapters Collection
  • Access the complete first chapters of books reviewed in NY Times Book Review, or appearing on the bestseller lists.

Web Directories

• British Academy Portal
  • The British Academy’s directory of online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
• Internet Public Library
  • A vast collection of web links organized by the University of Michigan.
• Intute: Arts & Humanities
  • Assembled by the University of Oxford, this collection include 18,000 Web resources that can be browsed or searched by keyword.
• UT Library Online
  • UT-Austin has a good directory of links to online text resources.
• Voice of the Shuttle
  • The most comprehensive directory of humanities web sites out there.
• Yahoo Humanities Directory
  • Another extensive collection of general humanities links.

Reference

• Cambridge History of English and American Literature
  • Contains over 303 chapters and 11,000 pages, with essay topics ranging from poetry, fiction, and drama, to history, theology and political writing.
• Columbia Encyclopedia
  • Contains over 50,000 articles, 40,000 bibliographic citations and 80,000 cross-references.
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• Another well known encyclopedia.
• Library of Congress
  • You can access the Library of Congress catalog online, plus many more helpful resources.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • A strong collection of entries on different aspects of philosophy.
• Strunk & White’s Elements of Style
  • The classic handbook on how to write in clear English.
• World Factbook
  • The U.S. government’s complete geographical handbook, featuring full-color maps and flags of all nations.