Guides @ UF: The Native Struggle for Justice in the Spanish Empire: Open Access Resources

Definition of Open Access

Open Access are scholarly resources that are digital, online, and free. The digital repositories listed here are not peer reviewed but contain holdings of renowned academic institutions.

Specialized Collections & Items

Indigenous Sources of Latin America

Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts at Tulane's Latin American Library
Codex Reese
A mid-16th-century map of Mexico City, which records the architecture and landholdings of a section of the city
Mexican Incunabula (1559-1600) at Tulane's Latin American Library
Mesoamerican Manuscripts at Princeton
Mesolore
Mesolore is a bilingual resource for scholars and students of Mesoamerica.
Early Nahuatl Library
Popul Vuh (@ OSU)
The Florentine Codex, Bernardino de Sahagún (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)
Khipu Database Project
Khipu are knotted textile record-keeping devices used by the Inkas.
The Guaman Poma Website
Autograph manuscript facsimile, annotated transcription, documents, and other digital resources.

Caribbean

Digital Aponte
A site dedicated to the life and work of José Antonio Aponte, a free man of color, carpenter, artist, and alleged leader of a massive antislavery conspiracy and rebellion in colonial Cuba in 1811-1812.
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive
An open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images.
Cuba in the Classroom Digital Archive
The materials currently included in this digital archive were collected by Dr. Ray Ball and undergraduate researcher Caroline Streff during the summer of 2017.

Slavery and the Afro-Latin Experience

Slavery and Revolution Jamaica and Slavery in the Age of Revolution
The main focus of the site is a collection of letters written by Simon Taylor, a wealthy and powerful Jamaican slaveholder. These letters are an important source of information about Caribbean slavery.
A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789
Includes the French originals and English translations.
The Louverture Project
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages
that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Slave Societies Digital Archive
The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies.
Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas

Other

Early Americas Digital Archive
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Base de Datos BRASILHIS
Redes personales y circulación en Brasil durante la Monarquía Hispánica, 1580-1640

Digital Archives & Libraries

Biblioteca Digital Hispánica
Open Access to digitized content from the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Universidad de Sevilla, Fondo Antiguo
Includes all the ancient books in the university's library including Sevillian sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
Biblioteca Dixital de Galicia
Includes content from the Biblioteca de Galicia as well as from other major libraries in the region.
SINGULARIS Tesoros Bibliográficos del Consorcio Madroño
Includes content from university libraries from the Consorcio Madroño.
Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano
Open Access to the cultural heritage of Iberoamerica.
Biblioteca Digital Mexicana A.C.
Established in 2010, this digital library was founded by four Mexican institutions: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, el Archivo General de la Nación, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CEHM-Carso.
Fondo Colonial Collection Archival Records, 1611-1821
The Fondo Colonial collection of the Archivo Históricos Municipal de Hidalgo del Parral (Parral Archive), spans a period between 1611 and 1821 and contains the civil colonial records of the Province of Nueva Viscaya, which today consists of the states of Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa and part of Coahuila.
Biblioteca Digital Nueva Miscelánea Austral
Includes colonial books from South America, for instance Peru.
Atlas Digital de América Lusa
Includes maps of Brazil during the colonial era.
Biblioteca Virtual de México
Biblioteca Digital Mundial
European Libraries
The John Carter Brown Library: Online Bibliographies
New Mexico Digital Collections
Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
Digital Public Library of America
Primeros Libros de las Américas
Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú
Includes content from indigenous people in South America, including Brazil.

Online Exhibits

Early Americas

Exploring the Early Americas
Exploring the Early Americas features selections from the more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress
Vistas. Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820
The Vistas project seeks to bring an understanding of the visual culture of Spanish America to a broad audience.

Indigenous Peoples

The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico
This virtual exhibition is based on The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico, a display of original manuscripts, books, and other materials at the Newberry Library from September 28, 2006 through January 13, 2007. Ellen T. Baird and Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera, both of the University of Illinois at Chicago, curated the exhibit. The virtual exhibit includes the complete text from the original gallery exhibit and digitized images of many of the manuscripts and books that were displayed.
The Expression & Legacy of Landownership in Mexico.
Maps and Highlights from the Luis García Pimentel Collection at UF.
Power of Attorney in Oaxca, Mexico
Power of Attorney constructs a geography of indigenous legal culture through digital maps and visualizations.

Slavery &the African-Latin Experience

The Other Revolution Haiti, 1789-1804
The Other Revolution follows on from the JCB’s participation in Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, a groundbreaking exhibition at the New-York Historical Society in 2011-12 that explored the monumental transformations to the world’s politics and culture in the time from Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761
This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.
First Blacks in the Americas. The African Presence in the Dominican Republic
The pioneering exhibit “Sixteenth-century La Española: Glimpses of the first blacks of the early colonial Americas” was shown for the first time at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute between the months of March and August of 2015.
African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World
This online exhibition examines the beginnings of Iberian expansion into the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Subject Guide

Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

Email Me

Contact:

Department of Special & Area Studies Collections

University of Florida

Phone: (352) 273-2692

mvargasb@ufl.edu

Maps

Map & Imagery Collections at UF
Early Maps from Mexico, Central & South America, and the West Indies
Maps at LANIC
Relaciones Geográficas. LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
The collection comprises original manuscript accounts and artistic renditions of the local geography of Mexico and Guatemala with dates ranging from 1578 to 1586.
A Journey Through Latin American Maps from the Columbian Encounter to the Present
Mapeando Colombia
Domains: The Colonial Spanish America Digital Jurisdictions Project
David Rumsey Map Collection

Digital Projects about Florida

La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archive of the Americas
The site offers users a multidisciplinary perspective of colonial Florida’s rich history.
Early Visions of Florida

Other Points of Access

Legajos en la web
This is a thorough list of state archives in Spain. It includes hyperlinks to each archive's website
Spanish Municipal Documents
Various early 16th century documents transcribed from Andalusian archives.
Internet Sites with Primary Sources for History: Latin America