Hocbigg - History
Path to a free self-taught education in History!
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Introduction
History is often mistaken for a static catalog of names, dates, and past events. In practice, it is an active, forensic discipline centered on how human societies change over time, how people in the past understood their circumstances, and how we interpret surviving evidence. Studying history equips you to interrogate received narratives, distinguish primary evidence from secondary interpretation, detect ideological bias, and trace the structural origins of the contemporary world.
This curriculum assumes no prior formal training in history. It is designed for self-directed learners who want to build the critical habits of mind, source-criticism skills, and broad chronological literacy of an undergraduate history education, without requiring institutional access or instructor guidance.
How to Navigate the Curriculum
The curriculum is structured so that methodological tools precede narrative scale, finishing with critical reflection on the discipline itself:
- Start with Method: Begin with Historical Thinking & Source Analysis. Interrogating provenance, conducting internal and external source criticism, and corroborating conflicting accounts gives you the evidentiary toolkit needed to critically evaluate historical claims.
- Work Chronologically: Proceed through the two global surveys in order: World History: Ancient to 1500 followed by World History: 1500 to Present. These provide a macro-historical framework of human development across Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, deliberately avoiding an exclusively regional or Eurocentric lens.
- Interrogate the Craft: Study Historiography & Historical Theory either alongside the modern survey or immediately after it. This subject pulls back the curtain on how historians construct narratives, how interpretive paradigms shift over time, and the debates surrounding historical truth and objectivity.
Scope
This curriculum focuses strictly on the foundational core that every student of history needs before specializing. It deliberately omits single-nation surveys, regional specializations, and thematic subfields like environmental history or the history of science.
Once you establish this foundation, you can put historical methods into practice through archival and digital research workflows in Projects, explore field-defining monographs in Readings, or study recorded regional lecture series in Courses.
Communities
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- You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.
Curriculum
Historical Thinking & Source Analysis
Introduces the fundamental epistemology and methods of historical inquiry, teaching learners how to interrogate primary and secondary sources, evaluate evidence, identify bias, and contextualize events within their proper historical settings.
From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Cornell University Press / Martha Howell & Walter Prevenier) - The primary methodology textbook, providing a systematic guide to source criticism, provenance, external and internal critique, and evidentiary standards across written and non-written artifacts.
The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History (Routledge / John Tosh) - An alternative or complementary foundational guide that adopts a more narrative approach, focusing on why historical questions matter and how modern subfields have broadened the scope of documentary evidence.
Reading Like a Historian (Digital Inquiry Group) - Practical, inquiry-driven exercises to apply alongside the readings, offering hands-on practice in the four core habits of sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading.
Working with Sources (The National Archives) - A concise reference checklist from professional archivists that complements the theoretical readings with practical questions to ask when analyzing physical and digitized primary documents.
World History: Ancient to 1500
Surveys the broad development of human civilizations from the origins of agriculture and the first urban centers through regional empires, Afro-Eurasian trade networks, and pre-Columbian societies up to the eve of global maritime interconnection.
World History, Volume 1: to 1500 (OpenStax / Ann Kordas et al.) - The primary open-access textbook for this period, offering comprehensive chronological coverage of pre-modern global civilizations and trans-regional exchanges.
History of the World to 1500 CE (Columbia University / Richard Bulliet) - A 25-lecture collegiate video course that complements the OpenStax textbook by providing deeper analytical lectures on early states, pastoralist networks, and religious systems across Eurasia and Africa.
Crash Course World History (CrashCourse / John Green) - An optional, fast-paced conceptual companion designed to help visual learners preview major macro-historical patterns before tackling the textbook chapters and university lectures.
World History: 1500 to Present
Examines modern global history from early trans-oceanic navigation and imperial expansion through commercial revolutions, industrialization, modern colonial empires, total wars, decolonization, and contemporary globalization.
World History, Volume 2: from 1400 (OpenStax / Ann Kordas et al.) - The primary open-access textbook for modern global history, tracking world economic integration, state formation, and global conflicts from the early modern era forward.
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910 (University of Virginia / Coursera / Philip Zelikow) - The first half of a two-part video lecture sequence that complements the textbook, focusing closely on the commercial, political, and industrial revolutions that built modern international systems; free to audit.
The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910 (University of Virginia / Coursera / Philip Zelikow) - The sequential continuation of Part One above, analyzing the world wars, ideological confrontation, decolonization, and late-twentieth-century globalization; free to audit.
Historiography & Historical Theory
Examines the intellectual evolution of historical writing, exploring the philosophical debates surrounding objectivity, evidence, and causation, as well as the major schools of interpretation that shape the modern discipline.
The Historian’s Craft (Vintage Books / Marc Bloch) - A foundational twentieth-century reflection by the co-founder of the Annales school on historical observation, analysis, and how historians reconstruct human experience beyond mere political chronology.
What Is History? (Penguin Books / E.H. Carr) - A seminal series of lectures analyzing the dynamic relationship between historians, facts, and subjective interpretation, serving as the traditional starting point for modern historiographical debate.
In Defence of History (W. W. Norton & Company / Richard J. Evans) - A modern counterpoint and successor to Carr and Bloch, defending empirical rigor and the possibility of historical knowledge against radical postmodern skepticism; best read after Carr.
What do historians do? (OpenLearn / The Open University) - An interactive introductory online module that bridges theory and practice, illustrating how working historians use material culture and archival clues to challenge accepted narratives.