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About
This research guide is a tool to help you identify and locate primary and secondary sources for your research relating to Caribbean History and Studies.
Short Link to this Guide: https://tinyurl.com/CaribbeanStudy
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. "In a Maroon town, Jim Crow country, Eastern Jamaica."The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1910. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/14fe0080-c6b8-012f-61dc-58d385a7bc34
Types of Sources
Primary sources are the evidence of history, original records or objects created by participants or observers at the time historical events occurred or even well after events, as in memoirs and oral histories. Examples of primary sources may include but are not limited to: letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, maps, speeches, interviews, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio or video recordings, born-digital items (e.g. emails), research data, and objects or artifacts (art, ancient roads, buildings). These sources serve as the raw materials historians use to interpret and analyze the past. Format: Primary sources are characterized by their content, regardless of whether they are available in their original format (possibly handwritten manuscript form), in microfilm/microfiche (mini reproduction of a document), in print or digital format.
Engaging Primary Sources:
- who was the original author or creator?
- date of publication (how close to the actual event)?
- intended audience?
- purpose of the source (to present facts, or point of view)?
- does it contain unspoken assumptions?
- anything about the author that may influence the validity or reliability of the source? any biases?
- how this source compares with others from the same period (are there inconsistencies or contradictions)?
- What views or power dynamics impacted the creation, commissioning or funding of this particular source?
- Whose perspective is in view? Whose perspective is invisible?
Secondary Sources are one step removed from primary sources, though they often quote or otherwise analyze or use primary sources. They can cover the same topic, but add a layer of interpretation and analysis. Secondary sources can include:; Analysis or interpretation of primary documents and historic events ; Scholarly articles or books about a topic, especially by people not directly involved (usually peer reviewed); Documentaries ( they often include photos or video portions that can be considered primary sources).
Evaluate Secondary Source Usefulness & Reliabiality:
- The author (can you determine their academic/social/cultural credentials?)
- Publication date (when was it written)? Consider the political, cultural and social context in which the source was written and if you require recent material
- Publisher (scholarly or academic press, or popular)?
- Intended audience?
- What sources does the author use as evidence (primary or secondary)?
- Sources: Do you know of any primary sources the author did not consider?; Does the author interpret the primary sources persuasively?; Does the author acknowledge other points of view?
- Check the bibliography or notes to see if other important works are referenced.
New Books
Strolling in the Ruins by ISBN: 1478019689Publication Date: 2023-03-17In Strolling in the Ruins Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean's present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa's place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.
White Gloves, Black Nation by ISBN: 9781469673684Publication Date: 2023-04-11This ambitious transnational history considers Haitian women's political life during and after the United States occupation of Haiti (1915-34). The two decades following the occupation were some of the most politically dynamic and promising times in Haiti's modern history, but the history of women's political organizing in this period has received scant attention. Tracing elite and middle-class women's activism and intellectual practice from the countryside of Kenscoff, Haiti, to Philadelphia, the Belgian Congo, and back to Port-au-Prince, this book tells the story of Haitian women's essential role as co-curators of modern Haitian citizenship. Set in a period when national belonging was articulated in philosophies of African authenticity, revolutionary nostalgia, and working-class politics, Grace Sanders Johnson considers how an emerging educated and professional class of women who understood themselves as descendants of the Haitian Revolution established alternative claims to citizenship that included, but were not limited to, suffrage and radicalism. Sanders Johnson argues that these women's political practice incorporated strategic class performance, extravagant sartorial sensibilities, and an insistence on self-promotion and preservation that challenged the exceptional trope of the martyred male revolutionary hero. Bringing her subjects vividly to life, she reveals their politics of wayfaring, moving deliberately if sometimes ineffectively through the radical milieu of the twentieth century.
Quick Guide to Caribbean History
Chronology of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean (more here)
Taino Names of Caribbean Islands
The Taino names of the Caribbean islands based on Jalil Sued-Badillo (ed.), ‘General History of the Caribbean, vol. 1: Autochthonous Societies’ (Paris: UNESCO Publishing/London: Macmillan 2003) Plate 8.
List of Indigenous Names & Peoples of Caribbean Islands (here)
Map of Indigenous Languages Caribbean 1492 (here)
