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.