History search engines are search tools, databases, or digital archives specifically designed to help users find historical information, resources, primary sources, scholarly articles, and more. They can be general in nature or focused on specific periods, topics, or types of resources.
Tips on Using History Search Engines with Students
History-focused search engines can be highly valuable tools for teachers. Here are some ways you can incorporate them into your teaching:
- Source Analysis: Have your students use these search engines to find primary and secondary sources on a specific historical event. Then, have them analyze the sources, comparing different perspectives, evaluating the reliability of the sources, and discussing how the event is interpreted differently in different sources.
- Research Projects: Assign research projects on specific historical topics, and guide your students in using these search engines to find relevant information. This not only teaches them about the topic at hand, but also helps them develop critical research skills.
- Teaching Information Literacy: Use these search engines as a tool to teach your students about information literacy. Discuss how to use advanced search features, how to evaluate the reliability of a source, and how to properly cite sources.
- Creating Timelines: Ask your students to use these search engines to find events, photos, and documents from a specific time period. Then, they can use this information to create a detailed timeline of the period.
- Debates or Role-Plays: Use these search engines to find information on different perspectives on a historical event. Assign students different perspectives, and have them use the information they find to prepare for a debate or role-play activity.
- Classroom Presentations: Allow students to use these search engines to prepare presentations on historical topics. This can be a great way to foster independent learning and boost presentation skills.
By integrating history-focused search engines into your teaching, you can not only make your history lessons more engaging, but also help your students develop key research skills that they can apply in many different areas of study.
Best History Search Engines
Here are our picks for the best history search engines:
1. Library of Congress Digital Collections
This is a vast collection of digitized primary source materials in a variety of formats (photos, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, etc.) from the Library of Congress’s collections. These resources cover a broad range of historical topics, time periods, and geographic locations.
2. The History Engine
The History Engine is ‘a collection of thousands of historical “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of the past that is freely available to scholars, teachers, and the general public. Students from a variety of college and universities write these episodes. Creating an episode for the History Engine gives them the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian’.
3. History Matters
‘Designed for high school and college teachers and students of U.S. history survey courses, this site serves as a gateway to web resources and offers unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents, and guides to analyzing historical evidence.’
4. Chronicling America
Chronicling America enables you to search America’s historic newspaper pages published between 1777 and 1963. Chronicling America is a fruit of ‘a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC)’.
5. Histography
Historiography is a timeline of historical events covering the era between 1600 to 2000. Every dot in the timeline represents a historic event from Wikipedia. You can easily resize the bar to view any time period or era you want.
6. Zoom In
Zoom In is ‘a free, Web-based platform that helps students build literacy and historical thinking skills through “deep dives” into primary and secondary sources. Zoom In’ s online learning environment features 18 content-rich U.S.
history units that supplement your regular instruction and help you use technology to support students’ mastery of both content and skills required by the new, higher standards:
- Reading documents closely and critically
- Identifying author’s point of view and purpose
- Engaging in higher-order, text-based discussions
- Writing explanatory and argumentative essays grounded in evidence.’
7. Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History offers various educational resources that cover topics related to racism, anti-semitism, and prejudice at key moments in history. The mission of the site, according to its founders, is to ‘help students connect choices made in the past to those they will confront in their own lives.’
They further added that, ‘independent research studies show that experience in a Facing History classroom motivates students to become upstanders in their communities, whether by challenging negative stereotypes at the dinner table, standing up to a bully in their neighborhood, or registering to vote when they are eligible’.
8. National Archives
The National Archives keeps historical documents, artefacts, and records related to the United States. These materials include family trees, online copies of veteran’s military service records, state and church records, and more.
‘Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching a historical topic that interests you.’
9. David Rumsey Map Collection
The David Rumsey Map collection features over 150.000 rare historical maps covering the period from the 16th to the 21st century. The collection includes ‘atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from around 1550 to the present.’
10. The Internet Modern History Sourcebook
the Sourcebook project seeks to present teachers and students with a wide variety of educational materials on ‘modern European history and American history, as well as in modern Western Civilization and World Cultures…A number of other online source collections emphasize legal and political documents.
Here efforts have been made to include contemporary narrative accounts, personal memoirs, songs, newspaper reports, as well as cultural, philosophical, religious and scientific documents.
Although the history of social and cultural elite groups remains important to historians, the lives of non-elite women, people of color, lesbians and gays are also well represented here.’
11. Digital History
Digital History offers a wide range of educational resources to help with the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges. The site also offers inquiry-based modules that provide primary sources on a number of historical events.
It also ‘offers many other ways to engage students in the study of history, from fact checks (multiple choice quizzes on every era of American history), to 19th century high school entrance examinations, a time machine, an interactive timeline that links to primary source documents, and a flash overview of American history.’
12. Google Scholar
This is a freely accessible search engine that indexes scholarly literature across many disciplines and formats. It includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, conference papers, and more. Google Scholar is useful for history research because it allows users to find scholarly articles and primary sources about a wide range of historical topics.
13. JSTOR
This is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Many of its resources are relevant to historical research. Access to JSTOR’s resources is often provided through educational institutions, but some content is also available for free, and individual subscriptions are available as well.
14. Project Gutenberg
This is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks, including many works of historical significance. It’s a good source for older works that are now in the public domain
15. Europeana
This is a database of digital resources from European museums, galleries, libraries, and archives. It includes texts, images, videos, and sound files covering many historical periods and topics.
Final thoughts
History search engines are invaluable digital tools that not only enrich the teaching and learning of history but also serve as vital conduits to a vast array of historical data. These specialized engines empower educators and students alike with the ability to delve into the past, offering access to an extensive range of resources from primary sources to in-depth scholarly articles.
They enable students to critically engage with historical events, foster sophisticated research skills, and build comprehensive understandings of historical narratives. With a curated selection of platforms—ranging from the comprehensive archives of the Library of Congress to the interactive timelines of Histography—students can traverse time and geography, uncovering the rich tapestry of human history.
