Primary Sources: World History

he journal of Aaron Thomas, housed in the University of Miami Libraries Special Collections Division, is a 374 page leather-bound volume containing approximately 367 pages of handwritten material. The journal begins on June 15, 1798 and concludes on October 26, 1799, and chronicles the experiences and adventures of a British seaman serving in the Royal Navy aboard HMS Lapwing in the West Indies during the French Revolutionary wars. The journal contains insightful, first-hand accounts of naval operations, customs of the day, and humorous, detailed anecdotes involving shipmates and superiors. Thomas, who joined the navy in 1793, includes entries regarding the health and punishment of the men aboard ship, as well as his personal views on slavery, religion, and morality. With the exception of the final three pages, all entries are written in Thomas's hand.

Digital Collections is a powerful tool for public positioning and visibility, national and international, of Dibam and its collections, as well as of the culture, heritage and memory of Chile. It is also a very useful instrument for formal and informal education. The program emerged in 2010 and makes digitized objects, photographs, documents and books available; research related to different areas related to heritage, such as: history, archeology, art, anthropology, literature, education, gender and natural sciences; and materials of a unique or local nature, such as local artisan expressions, oral and material traditions of indigenous peoples, works of artists and intellectuals relevant to the national scene, unpublished historical documentation, among others.

Selections documenting the culture, history and natural history of Baja California.

Official Spanish documents about the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahulia y Texas

The American Library of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library aims to make known the most representative authors and works of Latin American literature of all time.

The user of this American Library will find in it a large number of works as well as audiovisual materials, thematic portals, spaces dedicated to authors, which will allow them to approach, among others, spaces as diverse as Gaucho literature , Hispanic culture in the United States. United or the Brazilian creation ; to the Baroque world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or to the most contemporary reality in Mario Benedetti's poetry ; to outstanding collections such as the José Toribio Medina Library in Chile , the Reserved Funds of the National Library of Mexico or the Manuscripts of America in the Royal Collections; to the thought of the liberator Bolívar or to the great names of the Spanish exile in America .

A small digital collection of historical documents, dating from 500 to 1949.

Includes 19th and 20th century primary source materials such as postcards, photographs, newspapers and caricatures.

BDPI is a project of the Asociación de Bibliotecas Nacionales de Iberoamérica (ABINIA). Its objective is the creation of a portal which provides access, from a single search point, to the digital resources of all the participating libraries. This currently includes material from the national libraries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, España, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, República Dominicana, Panamá, Paraguay, Perú, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Uruguay y Venezuela. Sources include documents, books, maps, pictures, newspapers and music.

Oral histories and documents related to the 1942-1964 Bracero program, a guest worker initiative in which millions of Mexican agricultural workers were contracted to work in the U.S. Be aware that the site allows user contributions; these items have not been validated, and are clearly identified.

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 documents are presented in collaboration with Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). (Image, Ernesto Geisel, Shigeaki Ueki, Paulo Nogueira Batista, at an exposition promoted by Nuclebrás in March 1977, Paulo Nogueira Batista Archive at FGV)

Materials related to Cuban, Dominican and Haitian maritime migration from 1965-1996, including camps at the U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 1991-1996.

Over 1,200 images, maps and texts from the 18th and 19th centuries reveal contrasting experiences of life in the former British colonies.

Includes speeches, interviews, etc., by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. All texts here are in English, but the site offers links to additional multilingual resources.

This database includes speeches, interviews, etc., by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. All texts are in English. If you would like more recent speeches or texts in Spanish, please consult Discursos e Intervenciones de Fidel Castro, which has texts in a variety of languages starting with 1998, Discursos: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, or Discursos y otras intervenciones de Fidel Castro.

This collection features broadsides from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library's William J. Griffith Collection of Guatemala and Central America. Dating from the 1820s to 1922, the broadsides are primarily Guatemalan, with a smaller number from Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Many pertain to national and local politics and include election materials, political manifestos, and government pronouncements.

Children and Youth in History is designed to help teachers and students learn about the important roles of young people throughout history by providing access to information about the lived experiences of children and youth from multiple perspectives as well as changing notions about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations. The materials on this website address such questions as: What was it like to be a child or adolescent throughout history? How is childhood defined? How has it changed and how has it remained the same? What factors have shaped childhood and how did children shape history, society, and culture?

Declassified FBI, CIA and other U.S. government documents related to the Chilean military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Documenting War, Peace and Human Rights in Colombia

Correspondence and other papers from Confederate families who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War.

At the height of the Cold War, on 1 January 1959, a guerrilla army led by Fidel Castro defeated the US-backed Batista government. Attempts by the US government to undermine Castro's new administration, coupled with similarities of ideology, pushed Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union. So began years of dangerous political manoeuvring that culminated in the 1962 missile crisis and the day the world came close to nuclear war.

Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) Digital Collections
Below are descriptions and links to Cuban Heritage Collection digital collections with digital manuscripts, photographs, letters, maps and other resources held in the University of Miami Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection. These presentations have been developed collaboratively by teams comprised of archivists, Digital Initiatives staff and the Cataloging Department.

Documents concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962--a major confrontation that brought the Soviet Union and the United States close to war over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The documents are drawn from countries all around the world and discuss armament and military supplies sent to Cuba, troop training, security issues in the region, and relations with the US. There are many items of correspondence during the crisis itself, including letters between Soviet representatives in Cuba, the US, the UN, and the USSR Foreign Ministry. See also Cuban Foreign Relations, and the related collections in the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project. (Image: Executive Committee of the National Security Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Participants include President John F. Kennedy, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara in the White House Cabinet Room. (NARA 595950))

Approximately 1,850 photographs shot in Cuba between 1963 and 1964 and processed by Alberto Korda on the island.

The bulk of the ephemera currently found in the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera was originally created around the turn of the 20th century and after, with some originating as recently as within the last year. The formats or genre most commonly included are pamphlets, flyers, leaflets, brochures, posters, stickers, and postcards. These items were originally created by a wide array of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, public policy think tanks, and other types of organizations in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and activities. The vast majority are rare, hard-to-find primary sources unavailable elsewhere.

Digital images of over 75,000 pages of presidential speeches from the early 19th century to the present from Mexico and Argentina.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. The dLOC partner institutions are the core of dLOC. dLOC partners retain all rights to their materials and provide access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. (Information on how to become a dLOC partner).

New online resource for the Brazilian military dictatorship, 1964-85. Includes documents and press cuttings on censorship, trials, police activity, left-wing groups and much more. There are also links to relevant archives.

A collection of electronic texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

"Early Images of Latin America" provides over 1,800 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. Images come from an array of sources, such as promotional albums compiled as travel souvenirs for tourists, studio portraits, personal photographic albums, glass lantern slides and stereoscopic images, as well as images captured by professional and amateur photographers. The geographic scope of the collection includes Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay, with particular focus on the cities of Buenos Aires, Havana, Lima, Mexico City, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, San José de Costa Rica, and Tegucigalpa.

Delivers maps, photographs, and published materials, as well as field notes, letters, and a unique range of manuscript materials on selected expeditions between 1626 and 1953

This database includes speeches, interviews, etc., by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. All texts are in English. If you would like more recent speeches or texts in Spanish, please consult Discursos e Intervenciones de Fidel Castro, which has texts in a variety of languages starting with 1998, Discursos: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, or Discursos y otras intervenciones de Fidel Castro.

G.E.E. Lindquist Native American Photographs is an online presentation of the 1322 photographs, 124 postcards, 388 negatives, and 34 glass plate negatives/lantern slides, which derive from the G.E.E. Lindquist Papers archival collection at The Burke Library.
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These guide brings together information from diverse documentary and archival sources on aspects of the United States' diplomatic relations with a variety of countries.

Documents and showcases historic Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.

A database of primary sources on the history of science in Latin America and the Caribbean. The site, launched in January 2010, provides a virtual archive of over 200 primary sources along with introductions based on the latest scholarly findings.

Color photographs of Baja California and Nayarit, taken by author and cartographer Howard Gulick. 1938-1962

This information deals with human rights in Latin America, with some documents dating from 1964 to 1995. Most of the documents concern El Salvador and Guatemala, but the collection also contains records on Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, and Peru. Some documents were released in 1993 to the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, which sought information on 32 alleged human rights violations in El Salvador between 1980 and 1991. These records reveal that U.S. citizens, other foreigners, and indigenous people on both the left and right in El Salvador and Guatemala were victims of these kidnappings, murders, and other human rights abuses. This collection includes Agency publications analyzing the dynamics surrounding the improvement or worsening of the human rights situation in these Latin American countries, such as a CIA Inspector General's report and a Special National Intelligence Estimate on the performance of El Salvador regarding human rights.

This collection is designed to facilitate access to the hundreds of thousands of pages of full-text resources that are hosted by LANIC. These resources include research papers written by Latin American studies scholars; theses and dissertations; e-text versions of books; conference proceedings; speeches by Latin American leaders; periodical publications; and official documents.

LANIC's mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. LANIC's editorially reviewed directories contain over 10,000 unique URLs, one of the largest guides for Latin American content on the Internet.

These pamphlets document the emergence of the Latin American colonies as independent states, and illuminate many aspects of their populations' social and cultural life. Many pamphlets are devoted to boundary disputes, territorial expansion, the description of unexplored territories and the relationship between Church and State.

The digital collection portrays the landscape, people, and technology of various countries, including Costa Rica, Peru , Bolivia, El Salvador, and Cuba in the late 19th century, and includes a set of photos of St. Pierre, Martinique, before and after the eruption of Mt. Pelee in 1902. The DeGolyer Library also holds significant collections relating to Mexico, which are found in Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints.

"The Latin American Government Documents Archive (LAGDA) seeks to preserve and facilitate access to a wide range of ministerial and presidential documents from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Archive contains copies of the Web sites of approximately 300 government ministries and presidencies. Capture of sites began on multiple dates in 2005 and 2006..."

This important online collection provides more than 30 fully searchable Latin American newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries. Featuring titles from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere, the collection offers unprecedented coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped the region between 1805 and 1922. Through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, matrimony notices and obituaries, this unique collection chronicles the evolution of Latin American culture and daily life over two centuries.

Scarce and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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

Consists of campaign literature such as handbills, broadsides, posters, newspapers, bulletins, and pamphlets predominately from Central America and Mexico from the 1980s up to 2009.

he 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. Even though posters produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela are the most abundant among the more than two thousand currently available in the site, almost every country in the region is represented. In terms of topics, some of the best represented are human rights, elections, gender issues, indigenous issues, labor, ecology and environmental issues, development, public health, and education. The Latin American Posters Collection is a component of the larger collection of Latin American ephemera that Princeton University Library has developed since the 1970s.

Nice collection of primary sources related to Latin American history from the 16th through the 20th centuries.

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 digitisation of key texts that shaped liberal thought and practice in the region since the late eighteenth century. Archival materials have been carefully selected – such as political pamphlets, judicial records, and political ephemera – to provide researchers, educators and policy makers around the world with the tools to develop historical studies that will enhance our understanding of the liberal tradition in Latin America. The digital library traces the development of liberal ideology and practice through key themes: church and state, economic development, political culture, women and gender, and race and ethnicity. The resources primarily focus on the cases of Argentina, Mexico, and Peru, c. 1780-1930.

Links to the digitised collections of Luso-Hispanic interest in the Library of Congress

his website illustrates and describes a selection of original rare and historic maps chosen from the Map Collection of the University of Arizona Library. They portray a region of New Spain once called Pimería and chronicle four centuries of mapping from the earliest map of the region in the collection, a 1556 view of North and South America, up to the Gadsden Purchase of 1854 when Pimería Alta--or southern Arizona--was acquired by the United States from Mexico.

Pimería was a province or region--never precisely defined--of Spanish colonial Mexico encompassing what is now southern Arizona and northern Sonora, the name being derived from the Pima Indians who live in the region. The use of the term Pimería dates from the late seventeenth century, first appearing on a 1696 map prepared by the indefatigable explorer Fr. Eusebio Kino. The term appeared on eighteenth century maps, and on a few early nineteenth century maps. The name Pimería was one of five names proposed for the new Territory of Arizona established in 1863.

he 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.

The digital collection, Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts at the Latin American Library, presents images of the Library’s holdings of original and rare copies of Mexican manuscripts painted in the native pictorial tradition. They are painted on a variety of materials such as animal hide, maguey, amate or fig bark paper, linen, and European paper; their content dates to the early contact period (A.D. 1500 to 1700). The texts collected here represent a variety of themes: Aztec history and migrations, land claims and grants, property holdings, census data, fiscal and tribute accounts, and royal Mixtec genealogies.

Selected declassified documents of the US government on a wide range of subjects: Nuclear History, Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Intelligence and Secrecy, September 11, etc. A valuable collection of primary sources.

Serves as a gateway to digital collections at participating institutions. Content is in the field of American Studies, focusing on a hemispheric view of the Americas. Date coverage is 1500-1927.

A portal to more than twenty million documents and digital images from the principal Spanish archives, including the Archive of the Indies and Archive of the Spanish Civil War.

This website is the product of a project sponsored jointly by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICS) and the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA) now ILAS aiming to improve access to and use of their extensive collections of political ephemera. These collections are now fully searchable, and in addition a selection of the items can be viewed online in the gallery.

Some of these documents contain Spanish words that you may not know. Try to use context to figure out the meaning. If that doesn't work visit your handy Online Spanish-English Dictionary. Plug in the word and you'll get a translation pronto. It will even pronounce some of the words for you!

This page at this link provides access to digitized collections of primary material (in a variety of formats) related to Latin America. The materials available listed are freely available to the public and were created or hosted at an academic institution associated with SALALM, the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials. Under each title and link you will see an introductory note that briefly describes content and scope.

"Through the presentation in digital form of books, maps, prints and photographs, manuscripts and other documents from the collections of the partner libraries, this project illuminates five main themes related to the history of Brazil and the interactions between the United States and Brazil: Historical Foundations, Ethnic Diversity, Culture and Literature, Mutual Impressions, and Biodiversity." Covers the 18th century to the present.

Collection of print and visual resources. Use limiters in left column to focus search on specific geography, date range, topic or type of resource.