Caribbean Studies

Caribbean 

• Colonial Caribbean: is a collection of digitized British government documents produced by the British Colonial Office. These files document, from a British colonial perspective, the history of the Caribbean region from the 17th – 19th centuries. 

• Empire Studies: collection of digitized primary sources that document the British Empire and colonialism. See the collection on "Plantation Life int he Caribbean" which centers materials for the study of plantation life and slavery in Jamaica and documents covering the career of Simon Taylor (1740-1813) who controlled six Jamaican plantations and played a full role in Jamaican politics. 

• Caribbean Literature; Collection of Caribbean poetry and fiction published during the 19th and 20th centuries.

• Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice brings together digitized primary source material from archives around the world relating to the history of slavery, with a focus on the various forms slavery has taken around the globe, slaves' experiences and testimonies, abolitionist and social justice movements, and the global legacy of slavery. Document types include manuscripts, government publications, court records, pamphlets, books, maps, images, testimonials, and voyage logs. The collection includes materials produced in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, North America, and South America. It also includes thematic companion essays and historical timelines. Date: 1490-2008

• Empire Online: digitized primary sources on the history of empires and empire building in the modern era. The collection focuses on the British Empire, though it also includes materials on American imperialism, with materials written from a range of perspectives including indigenous peoples in Africa, India, North America and by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Germans. Material types include essays, atlases, monographs, autobiographies, reports of government agencies and voluntary organizations, magazine articles, fiction, sermons, letters, and diaries. Dates: 1492-2007

• Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969 is a collection of digitized British government documents produced by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. These documents, 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. This collection consists of documents for Central and South America and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. These files document Latin American history from a British perspective. Material types include diplomatic dispatches, charts and tables, accounts of tours, profiles of major personalities, correspondence, maps, conference and meeting minutes, and texts of treaties.

• Archives Unbound: Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s is a collection of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)’s previously classified files on prominent radicals and radical organizations from 1956 to 1971. The files include material such as newspaper clippings, meeting transcripts, internal bureau memoranda, and reports of special agents, which frequently refer to information provided by confidential informants. Subjects of the investigations include Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Organization, the Fire Bombing and Shooting at Kent State University, the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and a number of white supremacist groups. A significant portion of this collection documents COINTELPRO, the bureau's extensive "counterintelligence" program against dissent in the 1960s.

  This collection can be crossed search with another Archives Unbound collection, Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984. 

• HathiTrust Digital Library - Search millions of books, government publications, dissertations, journals, and other published and unpublished materials. Includes hundreds of works in French and Latin, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. (NetID Required)

U.S. Based Materials: these materials are included as possible sources for locating materials related to Black & U.S. based  dialogues or engagements with the Caribbean. 

• Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders. Types of material include articles and essays, monographs, speeches, interviews, pamphlets, and correspondence. Approximately twenty percent is previously unpublished, including transcripts from the Columbia University Oral History Project. Dates: 18th-20th centuries.

• African American newspapers in the South (series 1) Digitized historical newspapers originally published by and for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Southern U.S. Each newspaper issue in this collection has been fully digitized and is fully searchable, including all articles, obituaries, advertisements, editorials, and illustrations. Some of the major titles in the collection include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN). Dates 1827-1998

• The Liberator Newspaper. Boston: 1831-1865 (RU Login)

• Digital Library of the Caribbean: cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. Cultural, historical and research materials include images, books, maps, newspapers and more! 
• Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera (early 20th C-present): materials related toLatin American and Caribbean cultural, political and social life life with materials including 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.
• Early Caribbean Digital Archive: pre 1900, literary and cultural narratives written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/or colonized people of the Caribbean.
• John Carter Brown Library of Early America: digital archival collection of primary historical sources pertaining to North and South America from 1492 until the "end" of the colonial period 1825. Includes collections on Haiti, Cuba and Spanish America
• Haiti Digital Library

  Project of Duke University's Haiti Laboratory with links to a number of digital collections about Haiti

• Haitian Diaspora Oral Histories:  Univ. of Florida

• CARIDISCHO : A Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship: An open-source bibliography of digital resources resulting from—and meant for—the study of the Caribbean

IMAGES: 

• Africana and Black History: materials in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery
• The Luso-Hispanic New World in Early Prints and Photographs-- New York Public Library Digital Gallery
• Slavery Images: a visual record of the early African diaspora. digital archive for hundreds of historical images, paintings, lithographs, and photographs illustrating enslaved Africans and their descendants before 1900.
• World Digital Library, Library of Congress
• Caribbean Migration Collection (Duke University Libraries): Materials related to the migration by sea of Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians, including the refugee camp for Cuban and Haitian rafters that existed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, largely dating from 1991-1996. Collection includes camp newspapers, artwork created by refugees; materials from the U.S. Coast Guard and other military sources, such as newspapers written in Haitian Creole, photocopies of camp rules and refugee intake procedures, and a transcript from an introductory video shown to refugees arriving at the camps; magazines and media coverage of refugee situations, 

Maps of the Americas (UT Austin Libraries)

Maps produced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and archived by the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

Caribbean Map Collection (Africa Commons)

Includes maps from 1564 through the present, although historical maps form the bulk of the collection.

 

Caribbean Historic Maps, New York Public Library: maps of the Caribbean and Central American from 16th to the 19th centuries

• Caribbean Newspaper Digital Library: The Caribbean Newspaper Digital Collection, a subset of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), is a collection of digitized versions of Caribbean newspapers, gazettes, and other research materials on newsprint currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
• Ethnic NewsWatch is a collection of newspapers, magazines, and journals published by ethnic, minority, and native presses. These titles offer a wide range of viewpoints not offered in the mainstream press. The collection includes over 2.5 million articles from more than 300 publications. The majority the articles in the collection in English, but around 25% are in Spanish. includes publications from a wide range of ethnic presses, including African, African American, Arab American, Asian American, Caribbean, Eastern European, Hispanic, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Pacific Islander presses.
• Proquest Historical Newspapers:  The collections include the Chicago Defender, the Courier Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New Jersey Collection. This search allows you to search within all the newspaper collections simultaneously. Each issue has been fully digitized and indexed, including all articles, illustrations, and advertisements. (dates 18-20th C, depends on publication)

• Latin American Newspapers: Latin American Newspapers is a collection of historical newspapers from North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It includes all content originally published in print, including all articles, illustrations, and advertisements. Dates: 1800-1922

•  Global Press Archive: Rutgers University Libraries now has access to the following newspaper subcollections: East African Newspapers El Caribe Digital Archive. El Caribe is a Spanish-language daily newspaper published in Santo Domingo and is one of the Dominican Republic’s most influential and longest-running newspapers. Founded in 1948 under the repressive Trujillo regime (1930-1961), the newspaper has borne witness to decades of political uncertainty, economic development, and social change

• Access World News Access to the full text contemporary newspapers including over 2200 North American and over 1200 international newspapers.

U.S. Based News

Chicago Defender: Digitized collection of every issue of the Chicago Defender published from 1910 to 1975. The Chicago Defender was the most influential African-American newspaper of the 20th century.

History Commons: On August 30, 2024, the Accessible Archives legacy platform was retired and African American Accessible Archives modules moved to the History Commons platform. Modules that are moving include:  African American Newspapers in the South: Newspapers originally published by and for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Southern United States. African American Newspapers, Parts I-XII, Part XII Supplement: Newspapers originally published by and for African Americans throughout the 19th century. 

 

 

Sources in Spanish

• Biblioteca Digital Hispánica: The Hispanic Digital Library is the digital library of the National Library of Spain. It provides free access to thousands of digitized documents, including books printed between the 15th and 20th centuries, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, sheet music, historical press and sound recordings. See specific collections (Historia de América and Independencia americana)
• Latin American Travelogues digital collection: El Caribe Digital Archive: El Caribe is a Spanish-language daily newspaper published in Santo Domingo and is one of the Dominican Republic’s most influential and longest-running newspapers. Founded in 1948

Sources in French

• La Gazette Royale Project: all of the known issues of the two newspapers published during Henry Christophe’s rule of northern Haiti, as well as the six different versions of the comprehensive collection of Almanach Royal d’Hayti La Gazette Officielle de l’état d’Hayti and La Gazette Royale d’Hayti issued by the royal press. The most to appear in a single repository, there are 97 separate issues gathered on this website. Materials are downloadable and transcribed in French.
• Manioc : bibliothèque numérique Caraïbe, Amazonie, plateau des Guyane: Manioc is a digital library specializing in the Francophone Caribbean, the Amazon and the Guiana Plateau. You will find textual, audio, iconographic documents and references concerning the cultural, social, economic or political history of these territories.
• Gallica - A source of thousands of books in the collections of the National Library of France (BnF), but also of digitized manuscripts, still images, audiovisual materials, and more. (Open Access)

Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: This accessible database compiles information about more than 36,000 voyages that forcibly transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic between 1514 and 1866. Search and analyze the database for information on the broad origins of enslaved people, the tortuous Middle Passage, and the destinations of Africans in the Americas.

As you look for primary sources, you may encounter sources that are in Microfilm format— perhaps in the library catalog, worldcat or another scholars' bibliography.  If the material is not in our library, we can usually borrow via interlibrary loan. 

Microfilm is a length of film containing microphotographs of a newspaper, catalog, or other document. Often older newspapers and materials are on microfilm. These microphotos can be magnified and read by using a microfilm machine. Microfilm machines are in the Undergraduate study library on the first floor of Alexander library behind the circulation desk. Ask someone at the desk for help with using them!