For teachers and students

Our Earth’s History is a free, ad-free reference on world history, organised by continent and era. Every article ends with the sources it was checked against, so a reader can follow a claim back to the letter, excavation report or paper it came from. This page explains how the site can be used in a classroom and what the licence allows.

Finding material

• By place and time: the home page grid crosses the regions of the world with the eras from prehistory to the twentieth century. Each square opens a list of articles.
• By date: the timeline puts every article in order, one era at a time.
• One year, every continent: the “The world in…” pages describe what was happening across every region in a single year, such as AD 1550 or 1700 BC.
• By subject: the topic pages group articles under themes such as wars and battles, rulers and dynasties, culture and ideas, and daily life.

How each article is built

Articles open with a short answer (TL;DR), then the account, a list of key facts, a few common questions and the sources. Where sources disagree on a date, a number or a cause, the article gives each version and names who holds it rather than picking one. Siraf, a Persian Gulf port whose decline is explained in more than one way, is an example.

Drafts are written with AI assistance and then checked against the listed sources before publication. How we make it describes the process, and the sources policy explains which kinds of sources we use and which we leave out.

Ideas for class

• Follow a source. Pick one sentence in an article, open the source listed for it and find where the claim comes from. Does the source say exactly what the article says?
• Compare continents. Read one “The world in…” page and ask what the regions had in common that year, and what they could not have known about one another.
• Order events. Take five articles from the timeline, remove the dates and ask students to put them in order, then check.
• Read a disagreement. Use an article that sets two accounts side by side, such as Mycenae, 1876, where a famous line turns out not to be in the excavator’s own book, and discuss how historians decide between accounts.

Citing and sharing

Each article ends with a “Cite this article” box with APA, Chicago and MLA citations; see Cite this site. The text is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: you may copy, print and share articles for non-commercial teaching with credit and a link, but not publish changed versions. Photographs keep the licence shown in their captions.

Corrections and suggestions

If you find a mistake, or a subject your class needs that the site does not yet cover, write through the Corrections page. We check each report against the sources, update the article and list fact changes on that page.