Free history and social science courses
62 history and social science topics, each with a step-by-step guide and a free personalized course.
Learn the stories and ideas that shaped the world: ancient civilizations, empires, revolutions and world wars, plus the social sciences that explain how people and societies work, from economics and psychology to philosophy and political science. Each guide suggests what to read first, how to keep dates and causes straight, and how to weigh different interpretations.
Every history and social science course
- Learn History: Understand how the modern world was made, not just a list of dates.
- Learn Economics: Make sense of markets, money, and the decisions that move the economy.
- Learn Geography: Understand how the world fits together, from tectonic plates to trade routes.
- Learn Psychology: Understand why people think, feel, and act the way they do.
- Learn Philosophy: Think more clearly about the questions that matter most.
- Learn World History: Follow humanity from the first farms to the global age as one connected story.
- Learn US History: From Jamestown to the present, see how the United States argued its way into being.
- Learn Ancient Rome: From a hilltop town to a Mediterranean empire, and why the western half fell apart.
- Learn Ancient Greece: Democracy, drama, philosophy and war, from the Bronze Age to Alexander's heirs.
- Learn Ancient Egypt: Three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids and the river that made it all possible.
- Learn World War II: Understand the deadliest war in history, from its roots in the 1930s to its long aftermath.
- Learn World War I: How one assassination pulled Europe and its empires into four years of industrial war.
- Learn Cold War: Four decades of rivalry between superpowers that never fought each other head on.
- Learn Medieval History: A thousand years between Rome and the Renaissance, far less dark than its reputation.
- Learn European History: Five centuries of ideas, revolutions and wars that remade a continent and the world.
- Learn Political Science: Understand how power, institutions and elections work, without the cable news noise.
- Learn US Government: How the Constitution actually works, from Congress to the courts to your ballot.
- Learn Sociology: See the social patterns behind everyday life, from family to work to the internet.
- Learn Anthropology: Study what makes people human, from our earliest ancestors to the cultures of today.
- Learn Archaeology: How archaeologists read the past from soil, bones, pottery and the spaces in between.
- Learn Art History: Learn to really look at art, then understand why it was made the way it was.
- Learn Greek Mythology: Gods, monsters and heroes, and the ancient poems that first told their stories.
- Learn World Religions: The beliefs, practices and histories of the world's religious traditions, fairly told.
- Learn Ethics: Reason carefully about right and wrong, and see why thoughtful people disagree.
- Learn Ancient China: From Shang oracle bones to the Han court, the age that shaped Chinese civilization.
- Learn Ancient India: From the planned cities of the Indus to the courts of the Mauryas and Guptas.
- Learn Mesopotamia: Where cities, writing and written law began, between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
- Learn The Renaissance: Humanists, artists and printers who remade European culture by looking back to antiquity.
- Learn The French Revolution: From the Estates-General to Napoleon, ten years that redrew the politics of Europe.
- Learn The American Revolution: How thirteen colonies broke with Britain, fought a war and invented a republic.
- Learn The US Civil War: Slavery, secession and four years of war that ended with the Thirteenth Amendment.
- Learn The Industrial Revolution: Steam, cotton and coal, and how machines changed work, cities and the world economy.
- Learn The Byzantine Empire: The Roman Empire that kept going in the East for another thousand years.
- Learn The Ottoman Empire: Six centuries of a dynasty that ruled from the Balkans to Baghdad and Cairo.
- Learn The Mongol Empire: How a steppe confederation built the largest land empire the world had seen.
- Learn The Aztec Empire: The Mexica, their island city and the alliance that dominated central Mexico.
- Learn The Maya Civilization: Rival city-states, a fully readable script and a people who never disappeared.
- Learn The Inca Empire: An Andean empire run without markets or writing, connected by roads and knotted cords.
- Learn The Vikings: Raiders, traders and settlers who reached from Baghdad's markets to Newfoundland.
- Learn British History: Four nations, two thousand years, and how a small island state came to shape so much.
- Learn Chinese History: More than three thousand years of dynasties, revolutions and reinvention.
- Learn Japanese History: From Jōmon pottery to the Meiji Restoration and the remaking of postwar Japan.
- Learn Indian History: Five thousand years of the subcontinent, from Harappa to the Republic of India.
- Learn African History: Kingdoms, trade routes and independence movements across a whole continent.
- Learn Latin American History: From Tenochtitlan and Cuzco to the independence wars and the modern region.
- Learn Middle Eastern History: Empires, faiths and borders in the region where cities and writing began.
- Learn Russian History: Rus princes, Romanov tsars, Soviet leaders and the state that followed.
- Learn The Civil Rights Movement: The people, strategies and laws that ended legal segregation in the US.
- Learn International Relations: Why states go to war, make deals and build institutions with each other.
- Learn Criminology: Why people commit crime, how society responds, and how we measure both.
- Learn Linguistics: The science of how human language sounds, builds words and makes meaning.
- Learn Norse Mythology: Gods, giants, the World Tree and Ragnarok, straight from the Eddas.
- Learn Egyptian Mythology: Gods of sun, river and underworld, and the journey of the soul after death.
- Learn Microeconomics: How buyers, sellers and single markets decide prices and quantities.
- Learn Macroeconomics: Growth, inflation, recessions and the policies that try to steer them.
- Learn Behavioral Economics: Where psychology meets economics, and why people do not act like textbook models.
- Learn Stoicism: The ancient philosophy of virtue, reason and focusing on what is in your control.
- Learn Existentialism: Freedom, anxiety and meaning from Kierkegaard to Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus.
- Learn Cognitive Psychology: How the mind attends, remembers, reasons and decides, studied by experiment.
- Learn Developmental Psychology: How people change in body, mind and relationships from infancy to old age.
- Learn Social Psychology: How other people shape what you think, feel and do.
- Learn Positive Psychology: The science of well-being, strengths and what helps people flourish.
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