Humanities
The record of what people did and why — organised by period and region, because that is how the evidence organises itself.
31 fields · 349 topics · 337 curated works
Before writing, which is most of the story — migration out of Africa, the other hominins, and the turn to farming.
Foundations & Overviews · Palaeolithic Societies · Out of Africa Migrations · Neanderthals & Denisovans · Cave Art & Early Symbolism
Where cities, writing and law first appear — Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, and the cuneiform archives that let us read them at all.
Foundations & Overviews · Sumer · Akkadian Empire · Babylonia · Assyria
Three thousand years of continuity, unusually well documented.
Foundations & Overviews · Predynastic Egypt · The Old Kingdom & Pyramids · The Middle Kingdom · The New Kingdom
The source of most Western political and philosophical vocabulary.
Foundations & Overviews · Minoan & Mycenaean Civilisation · The Greek Dark Ages · Archaic Greece · The Polis & City-States
From kingdom to republic to empire — and the Roman historians who argued, while it was happening, about why it was going wrong.
Foundations & Overviews · The Roman Kingdom · The Roman Republic · The Punic Wars · Julius Caesar
The longest continuous political tradition on earth.
Foundations & Overviews · Shang Dynasty · Zhou Dynasty · Warring States Period · Qin Unification
Indus cities, Vedic culture and the great empires.
Foundations & Overviews · Indus Valley Civilisation · The Vedic Period · Mauryan Empire · Ashoka
Complex societies that developed in complete isolation from Eurasia.
Foundations & Overviews · Olmec Civilisation · Maya Civilisation · Teotihuacan · The Aztec Empire
A thousand years usually described in a caricature.
Foundations & Overviews · The Early Middle Ages · The Carolingian Empire · Feudalism · The Manorial System
The half of Rome that lasted another millennium.
Foundations & Overviews · Foundation of Constantinople · Justinian I · Byzantine Administration · The Iconoclast Controversy
From Arabia to Andalusia to Delhi — the caliphates, the Golden Age of translation and science, and the Ottoman centuries after.
Foundations & Overviews · Rise of Islam · The Rashidun Caliphate · Umayyad Caliphate · Abbasid Caliphate
The parts of African history most curricula skip.
Foundations & Overviews · Kingdom of Kush · Aksum · Ghana Empire · Mali Empire & Mansa Musa
Europe reorganising its intellectual and religious life.
Foundations & Overviews · Italian Renaissance · Renaissance Humanism · The Medici · The Printing Revolution
Global contact, and its violent asymmetries.
Foundations & Overviews · Age of Exploration · Portuguese & Spanish Empires · The Columbian Exchange · Conquest of the Americas
The eighteenth-century argument about reason and authority.
Foundations & Overviews · Enlightenment Thought · The Republic of Letters · The Encyclopédie · Enlightened Absolutism
The period when the modern political order was forced into being.
Foundations & Overviews · The English Civil War · The Glorious Revolution · The American Revolution · The French Revolution
The fastest change in material conditions in human history.
Foundations & Overviews · The Industrial Revolution · Factory System & Labour · Urbanisation in the 19th Century · Railways & Steam
The catastrophe that shaped everything after it.
Foundations & Overviews · Causes of the First World War · The Alliance System · Trench Warfare · The Western Front
Twenty years of unresolved consequences — Weimar, the rise of fascism, the Depression, and the appeasement that followed.
Foundations & Overviews · The Weimar Republic · Rise of Fascism · Rise of Nazism · Stalin's Soviet Union
The largest and deadliest conflict in history.
Foundations & Overviews · Outbreak & Blitzkrieg · The Battle of Britain · Operation Barbarossa · The Pacific War
Studied because the mechanisms are not unique to one place or time.
Foundations & Overviews · Origins of Nazi Antisemitism · Ghettoisation · The Einsatzgruppen · The Camp System
Forty-five years of confrontation without direct war between the principals.
Foundations & Overviews · Origins of the Cold War · Containment Policy · The Marshall Plan · The Berlin Blockade & Wall
The dismantling of empires and what replaced them.
Foundations & Overviews · Indian Independence & Partition · African Independence Movements · Algerian War · Indonesian Independence
The region where imperial decisions have the longest half-life.
Foundations & Overviews · Fall of the Ottoman Empire · Sykes-Picot & Mandates · Formation of Modern States · Oil & Politics
The century in which the centre of gravity moved.
Foundations & Overviews · Chinese Republican Era · The Chinese Civil War · Mao & the People's Republic · The Great Leap Forward
Post-independence trajectories, divergent and instructive.
Foundations & Overviews · Post-Colonial African Politics · African Economic Development · Conflict & State Failure · South Africa After Apartheid
Since 1991, recent enough to be contested — the post-Cold War order, 9/11, China's rise, 2008, and the internet's arrival.
Foundations & Overviews · Post-Cold War Order · Yugoslav Wars · Globalisation Era · September 11 & the War on Terror
Warfare as a subject in its own right — strategy, operational art, and the logistics that decide campaigns more than battles.
Foundations & Overviews · Ancient Warfare · Medieval Warfare · Gunpowder Revolution · Naval Warfare
How ordinary people actually lived — food, work, childhood and disease, reconstructed from what archives left in passing.
Foundations & Overviews · History of Food · History of Work · History of Childhood · History of the Family
The history of ideas and how they travel — science, technology, political thought, and the books and readers that carried them.
Foundations & Overviews · History of Ideas · History of Science · History of Technology · History of Political Thought
How history is made, and why accounts differ.
Foundations & Overviews · Historical Method · Primary Source Analysis · Schools of Historiography · Annales School
No prior grounding assumed.
The Code of Hammurabi
Hammurabi · 1754 BCE
Sets out roughly 280 case-based rulings whose penalties scale with the social rank of both parties, showing that early written law codified an…
+68 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Athenian Constitution
Aristotle · 330 BCE
A history and analysis of Athens's changing constitutional forms from Solon to the restored democracy, combining institutional description with an…
+126 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides · 400 BCE
The first account of war written as analysis rather than myth, including the still-cited claim about fear driving conflict.
+140 more at this level
12 of 337 works
Hammurabi
Sets out roughly 280 case-based rulings whose penalties scale with the social rank of both parties, showing that early written law codified an existing hierarchy rather than equality before it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hesiod
The first attempt to systematise Greek myth into a coherent genealogy of the gods, from primordial Chaos down to the reign of Zeus.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sun Tzu
Argues that the best victory costs no battle, because war is decided by position, information and the enemy's calculations before the armies ever meet.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Herodotus
The founding work of Western historical writing, arguing the Greco-Persian Wars were the record-worthy climax of a long cycle of cultural collision between Greece and Asia.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pliny the Younger
A senator's private correspondence covering everything from Vesuvius's eruption to his own administration of a province, giving one of the few surviving first-person pictures of upper-class Roman daily life.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copySuetonius
Biography as character study: each emperor is judged by private vice and public act together, which set the pattern for how Rome's rulers have been remembered ever since.
about 16 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyFaxian (Fa-Hien)
A Chinese Buddhist monk's travel diary of Gupta-era India around 400 CE is the fullest outside eyewitness account of daily life and Buddhist practice under Chandragupta II's rule.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marco Polo
Recounts a Venetian merchant's decades in the service of Kublai Khan, describing the cities and trade routes linking China to the Mediterranean and giving Europe its first detailed account of the Silk Road's eastern half.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christopher Columbus
Columbus's own shipboard log of the 1492 crossing records the moment European and American peoples became aware of each other, and shows his growing willingness to mislead his crew about the distance sailed.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Desiderius Erasmus
A satire narrated by Folly herself argues that human institutions, including the Church's own rituals and scholastic learning, run on self-deception and vanity far more than on the reason they claim.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Bartolome de las Casas
A Spanish friar's eyewitness account of the killing and enslavement of indigenous peoples across the conquered Americas, written as an appeal to the Spanish crown to end the abuses of the encomienda system.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Voltaire
Uses admiring reports on English religious toleration, Newton and constitutional government to needle French absolutism by comparison — itself an act of the cross-Channel exchange it describes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026