Below you will find web links, extra printables, and other resources to use along with the Modern World History units in the Layers of Learning curriculum. Check out our Amazon store to see fun goodies we recommend to accompany this course.
Modern World History is sold as a single volume and as individual units, which are like chapters within the Modern World History book. Here’s a link to a free printable cover to accompany all of your Modern History PDF units.
Industrial Revolution
- Industrial Revolution YouTube Playlist
- Explore this page about Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor in early 20th century America
- Read primary accounts about child labor in the factories of England
- Read I, Pencil an eye opening essay by Leonard Read about how making one pencil takes dozens of people across the globe
- Visit the Derby Silk Mill Museum of Making online to view a 1721 factory and the collection of inventions it houses
- Explore the way a n electron microscope works with this online simulator
- Khan Academy Unit on Industrialization
Revolutionary Republics
- Revolutionary Republics YouTube Playlist
- Read these three documents about rights of self-government and individual autonomy and compare them:
- Declaration of the Rights of Man (France 1789)
- Declaration of Independence (American Colonies 1776)
- Virginia Declaration of Rights (Virginia 1776)
- The complete text of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
- What Is The Third Estate? by Abbe Sieyes (French Revolution)
- An interactive map showing all of Napoleon’s battles
19th Century
- 19th Century YouTube Playlist
- Read about the daily lives of Victorians
- Read about the 1888 Match Girls Strike in England
- The HMS Black Joke fight against a slave ship
- An article on landlordism in Ireland leading up to the Great Famine
- A series of articles about the prelude, famine, and effects of famine in Ireland
- Read journal entries from Sergeant Timothy Gowing, Royal Fusiliers from the Crimean War
- An article about Captain Louis Nolan, one of the first to die in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War
- Read Wellington’s Dispatches from the Peninsular War to see what military dispatches were like (Crimean War dispatches are not digitized and available)
- A brief biography of Karl Marx
- Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or download the pdf
- List of countries where communism has been tried and the results in each country
- “What If Africa Was Never Colonized?” from AlternateHistoryHub
Early 20th Century
- Interactive map and primary source documents about WWI from the U.S. Library of Congress
- Letters from WWI soldiers in the UK National Archive
- A first hand account of what it was like to be a Jew in Tsarist Russia in 1890
- Take a test to see where your politics are on a 2 dimensional spectrum at politicalcompass.org
- A detailed, but simple, analysis of the causes of the Great Depression (focused on the United States).
- An article on how the Great Depression affected Canada
- The Great Depression in Britain