Latin American History

"LANIC's mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. Our target audience includes people living in Latin America, as well as those around the world who have an interest in this region. While many of our resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, our site has also become an important gateway to Latin America for primary and secondary school teachers and students, private and public sector professionals, and just about anyone looking for information about this important region."

The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) is a consortium of research libraries that seeks to increase free and open access to information in support of learning and scholarship in Latin American Studies. It mobilizes collaborative activities among individuals and organizations on a global scale but focuses on relationships within the academic library community.

This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. The materials listed are freely available to the public and were created or are hosted at an academic institution associated with SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials), either through institutional membership or through the personal membership of a staff member. The sources linked below range from collections of Mexican incunabula (1559-1600), to Latin American posters. The site is organized by format “Historical Texts by Country“, “Historical Texts General“, “Statistics“, “Visual Material by Country“, “Visual Material General“, and “Miscellaneous.”

A product of broad international collaboration, these digitized documents from the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) aim to facilitate scholarly and legal research into a vast cache of historical documentation. The discovery of the National Police Historical Archive in 2005 opened an extensive and timely resource for the study of Guatemalan history and human rights in the region, spanning a broad array of topics from Guatemala's armed conflict between 1960 and 1996 to the sexually transmitted disease experiments performed at the behest of the United States government in the 1940s. This site currently includes over 10 million scanned images of documents from the National Police Historical Archive

715 digitized pamphlets documenting a century of Bolivian literate culture, beginning in 1848

"The Bibliografía Mesoamericana, jointly supervised by John Weeks of the Museum Library of the University of Pennsylvania and Sandra Noble of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), provides a comprehensive and continually updated bibliographic dataset of the published literature pertaining to the anthropology of Mesoamerica. Content includes archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, art history, linguistics, physical anthropology, and other related disciplines."

Biblioteca Digital Andina (BDA) is an open access initiative of the Andean Community. The BDA, which opened in August 2002, includes 1,200 full-texts representative of the cultural heritage of the Andean countries and it is also an environment for sharing information, knowledge and services. This initiative, coordinated by the Documentation Center of the General Secretariat of the Andean Community, has a network of 28 agencies participating in the Andean countries: national libraries, universities, government agencies and NGOs working on the following topics: Andean culture, biodiversity, education, classics, children's literature, Aboriginal languages ​​and integration.

"Acceso libre y gratuito al patrimonio cultural digital iberoamericano"

The Hispanic Digital Library is the digital library of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. It provides access free of charge to thousands of digitized documents, including books printed from the 15th to the 19th century, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historic newspapers and magazines and audio recordings. Part of the BDH is the Hemeroteca Digital, a collection of historical Spanish newspapers, which can be consulted separately. The BDH can be searched by title, author, material, collection and description through the search page. A full text search is available too. It is also possible to browse the BDH by collection using the Colecciones BDH page.

"The Mexican Digital Library (BDMx) publishes valuable and meaningful Mexican historical documents, little known and difficult to access, in an integral form and with each expandable image, for a better consultation and appreciation, and with historiographical introductions to put them in value. The BDMx has twelve partners, including the Mexico Library Vasconcelos, the National Library of Anthropology and History, the General Archive of the Nation, the Cervantine Library of Tec de Monterrey, the Clavigero Library of the Ibero-American University and the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Carso."

A digital photographic archive created by the Fundacao Biblioteca Nacional and the Instituto Moreira Salles. Text is in Portuguese.

The Latin American Microfilm Project (LAMP) at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has digitized executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil’s national government between 1821 and 1993, and by its provincial governments from the earliest available for each province to the end of the first Republic in 1930.

Drawn from Brazilian and US government sources, this collection documents the evolution of the Brazilian nuclear program from the first proposal presented to the government in 1947, through the decision to establish a secret civilian-military program in 1978, until the end of the parallel military program in 1989.

The Guatemala News and Information Bureau (GNIB) was an activist and solidarity group based in San Francisco, California, created in 1978 to support and inform the public about Guatemalan movements for peace and justice, indigenous rights, and labor rights. To support its activities, the GNIB systematically collected a wide variety of materials documenting all aspects related to the civil war in that country, including human rights abuses and the social and political responses to state sponsored violence. Also documented were the negotiations and the implementation of the Peace Accords signed in the mid 1990s.

"CLASE is a bibliographic database created in 1975 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The database is updated daily and more than 10,000 records are added each year. It offers about 330,000 bibliographic records of articles, essays, book reviews, literature reviews, short notes, editorials, biographies, interviews, statistics and other documents published in about 1,500 journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, specializing in social sciences and humanities. " In Spanish.

In 1868, a number of families from former Confederate states in the South fled the Reconstruction policies for Brazil. The family of Colonel William H. Norris was the first to arrive from Alabama. His son Robert C. Norris and daughter-in-law Martha Temperance [Patti] Steagall as well as his own daughter Angela Norris accompanied the Colonel.
This collection contains correspondence from the Norris family [1861-1909] and John R. Buford [1862-1876] as well as early Southern Methodist-Episcopal Mission Reports about the Confederados community [c. 1867-1874], and memoirs of some of the descendants [1970s-1988]. Transcripts are provided for all but the letters written in old Portuguese.

Digital manuscripts, photographs, letters, maps and other resources held in the University of Miami Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection.

"This collection contains retrodigitized cultural magazines from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru and Puerto Rico dating back to the period between 1880 and 1930."

"The Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis."

See especially the Haiti Collection, the Portugal and Brazil Collection, and the Spanish America Collection.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

""Early Images of Latin America" provides 1,136 images from the Latin American Library’s Image Archive documenting people, places, landscapes, urban and rural scenes in various countries of the region from the mid-19th century to c. 1910."--Tulane University Digital Library

"The ESSSS project, directed by Jane Landers and administered at Vanderbilt University, digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. Other non-European groups, such as Chinese and indigenous groups are also represented. This website provides information about the project and its history and tools that allow researchers to search the ESSSS database containing over 600,000 documents from diverse archives in four countries (for image counts by country, click here). While most of the documents contained here date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are documents from Cuba and Spanish Florida from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth."

7846 virtual reading room documents on El Salvador.

"Unless action is taken now, much of mankind’s documentary heritage may vanish - discarded as no longer of relevance or left to deteriorate beyond recovery. This website explains what the Endangered Archives Programme is, and how it can help."--British Library.

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. Includes 1945-1988.

5464 documents in the virtual reading room.

Free access to digitized magazines from Spain and Latin America. Created by the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana.

Full text images of two journals--La Cultura En Mexico (1987-1988) and Los Libros (1969-1976).

The Latin American Open Archives Portal is a project of the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project - LARRP, in collaboration with the Latin American Network Information Center - LANIC, to improve access to social sciences grey literature produced in Latin America. The portal provides access to working documents, pre-prints, research papers, statistical documents, and other difficult-to-access materials from the "deep Web." Typically, this content is published by research institutes, non-governmental organizations, and peripheral agencies that are not controlled by commercial publishers.

Harvard's Widener Library is the repository of many scarce and unique Latin American pamphlets published during the 19th and the early 20th centuries. One of the few institutions to have consistently collected Latin American pamphlets, Harvard has benefited from collections formed by Luis Montt (Chile), Nicolás Acosta (Bolivia), Manuel Segundo Sánchez (Venezuela), José Augusto Escoto (Cuba), Blas Garay (Paraguay), Charles Sumner, John B. Stetson and others. Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico are the countries most heavily represented in this collection.

Pamphlets, posters, and other campaign literature issued primarily by political parties in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

The posters included in this collection were created by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and services.

This is a unique scholarly resource of materials to help the UK and international academic community to trace the rise, consolidation and development of liberal ideology and practice in Latin America during the long nineteenth century. This has been achieved through the digitization of key texts that shaped liberal thought and practice in the region since the late eighteenth century.

The books whose images make up this digital presentation offer a rich sampling of the extraordinary variety of NYPL's pictorial holdings on Latin America from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Correspondence, project files, subject files, and publications documenting the human rights activism of the Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer in 1970s and 1980s Argentina.

The Latin American Library at Tulane University is home to one of the premier collections of original Mexican pictorial manuscripts found within the United States. These treasures, along with extensive holdings of rare books, other original manuscript collections, comprehensive holdings of facsimile editions of other codices, and other scholarly research materials and primary sources, distinguish it as one of the world’s foremost collections for the study of Mesoamerican writing systems and painted manuscripts, pre-Columbian culture, and early Colonial Mexican history and society.

"Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents, ... leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets. " Dr. Snider: It "has plenty on Latin America (especially regarding US-Latin American in the late-20th century)."

This database present statistical series of a wide range of economic and social indicators from 20 countries through all the twentieth century.

Panama and the Canal is a joint project from the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries and the Panama Canal Museum. Panama and the Canal builds from the former Panama Canal Museum's rich collection of Panama and Canal Zone materials and the extensive holdings on Panama and the whole of Latin America from the George A. Smathers Libraries' Latin American & Caribbean Collection, Government Documents Collection, and Map & Imagery Library. The Government Documents Department the Center of Excellence for the U.S. Panama Canal Commission and its predecessor agencies.

"a collection of artifacts and sites from the Ancient Americas"

Digital collection of the first books printed in Mexico before 1601.

Radio Venceremos, the rebel radio station that broadcast from the mountains of Morazán, El Salvador during the eleven year Salvadoran Civil War (1981-1992), produced an important collection of recordings that contain valuable historic, anthropologic and ethnographic information, particularly in regards to human rights violations during an era of social transformation in Central America.

"Virtual library"; open-access portal to social science reports from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales.

This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Available at Baylor University, University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, and Texas A&M.

Includes letters by Jamaican slaveholder Simon Taylor.

The Taller de Gráfica Popular (known as TGP) was founded 1937 by the talented Mexican artists Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O'Higgins. The TGP became the first self-supporting art workshop in Mexico to create and publish their own work. Their work had a variety of objectives; some overtly political, some comic, and some artistic. The Princeton University Library has collected TGP prints by Alberto Beltrán, José Chávez Morado, Francisco Mora, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Zalce, among others.

"The Ayer collection is truly vast, containing 130,000 volumes, over one million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings. The collection covers not only American Indian history, but archaeology, voyages, exploration and accounts of early America, the development of cartography, Philippine and Hawaiian history, and Central and South American history. " Available at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Latin American Microfilm Project (LAMP) at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has digitized executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil’s national government between 1821 and 1993, and by its provincial governments from the earliest available for each province to the end of the first Republic in 1930. Available at Rice University.

The most important papers generated by the British Foreign and Colonial Offices. These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad. Available at Rice University.

"This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology." Available at University of Texas at Austin and Rice University.

Provides access to full-text searchable news reports from Latin America translated into English between 1974-1996 by the now defunct Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which gathered open source intelligence for the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). FBIS gathered news reports from radio broadcasts, news services, and clandestine broadcasts. University of Texas at Austin has access to the Latin American reports.

Provides access to documentaries produced in Latin America, by some of the most important producers and independent filmmakers in Latin America. The documentaries cover Latin American issues, such as cultural identity, political history, human rights, popular culture, agribusiness, education, religion, and more. The collection’s materials are presented in their original language with abstracts and indexing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Available at the University of Texas at Austin.