ARTH 4166/6166 Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (Spring 2024): Primary Sources

Browse footnotes and bibliographies of books, encyclopedias, and articles for information about primary sources.

Search the Library Catalog for primary sources--both unpublished manuscripts and modern editions in print and online, sometimes in translation, of original primary sources. Use keywords such as:

• sources
• diaries
• personal narratives
• interviews
• letters
• correspondence

When you can't find published primary sources, you may be able to get ahold of electronic or microfilm copies

Much archival primary source material has been filmed over the years, but using it will take some getting used to.  Ask for help with microfilm, microfiche, or microcards at a reference desk!

Using Microfilm
A sense of what it is and how you use it

Find an archival collection: Archive Finder

SNAC: Social Networks and Archival Context

Historical Primary Sources: Cornell's Subscription Databases

Digital Rare & Distinctive Collections at the Cornell University Library

This is just a sampling of the many, many primary resources available in electronic form.
Try the "history: primary sources" section of the Cornell library databases list.

• European Views of the Americas, 1493-1750

  This bibliographic database covers the history of European exploration as well as portrayals of native American peoples. A wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery. The original bibliography was co-developed by John Alden and Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books at The John Carter Brown Library.

  more...

• EENA: Early Encounters in North America - Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment

  This database, assembled from hundreds of primary sources, documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. It includes works by American Indians as well as a wide range of Europeans. It captures first impressions, records hundreds of years of observations of flora and fauna, describes encounters with native peoples presents a new literature with words and metaphors created in response to new places, and much more. The database includes prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, photographs, and original facsimile pages all searchable by standardized vocabulary.

Peru: Archivo General de la Nación

The Newberry Library's Latin American History Collection

Newberry Library Digital Collections (via Internet Archive)

Yale University Latin American Pamphlet Collection: Peru (Olin Microfiche 794)

The Latin American Pamphlets Collection--available on microfiche--contains approximately 10,000 priceless publications documenting social, political and economic conditions in the region from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. While coverage is strongest for independence movements betweeen 1808 and 1830, particularly in Mexico and Peru, the collection of first-hand accounts, government records, economic reports, biographies, political broadsides, scholarly theses, religious and civic speeches, and playbills is a springboard for countless research projects, ranging from internal social history to the United States-Mexican conflict.

In addition to illuminating Spanish civil society, religion, military, economy, and government in the Andes before nineteenth century independence, the Andean Collection contains religious documents detaling native peoples' "demonic" religious practices, first hand accounts of the Tupac Amaru indigenous rebellion, correspondence by and related to revolutionary leaders Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Antonio José de Sucre, and foreign correspondence sketching Lima society between 1869 and 1871. The collection is mostly focused on Peru, but includes Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Personal correspondence, government reports, laws, accounting ledgers, official Church documents, manuscripts and publications document the Bourbon reforms, Indian unrest, the Wars of Independence, the early Republics, and the nineteenth century war of the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Also of interest are Jesuit reports from indigenous communities in Paraguay and other remote environs. The collection's depth provides insights to both 'everyday' social history as well as the racial, economic, and religious fires that fueled the region's most dramatic conflicts.

Guide to Latin American pamphlets from the Yale University Library, selections from 1600-1900

• v. 1. Mexico: Subject guide, A-Im.
• v. 2. Mexico: Subject guide, In-Z.
• v. 3. Mexico: Author/Title guide.
• v. 4. Mexico: Chronological guide.
• v. 5. Peru: Subject guide.
• v. 6. Peru: Author/Title & Chronological guide.
• v. 7. Miscellaneous guide.