Digital Resources: The DeGolyer Library

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne E. Peterson ◽  
Cindy Boeke
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
School Students ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
Manuscript Collections

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Collections at Southern Methodist University's DeGolyer Library focus on the U.S. West, the Spanish borderlands, transportation, business history, and much more. The DeGolyer has over 900,000 photographs and is especially rich in Mexican photography. With more than 120 Mexican accessions, mostly from the period ca. 1865–1930, the DeGolyer has one of the most comprehensive photographic collections in the country totaling more than 8,500 photographs and 3,000 negatives. Additional Mexican accessions include portraits, manuscript collections of viceroyalty documents (some signed by Spanish kings), land grants, applications for nobility, documents related to the Catholic Church and to the emperors Iturbide and Maximilian, materials from the Mexican War and Texas Revolution, early maps, currency, and rare books. A country of great beauty and geographical diversity, Mexico has attracted a variety of photographers from abroad as well as regional image-makers. More than thirty photographers are represented at the DeGolyer. Subjects include landscapes, native peoples, railroads, mining, agriculture, tourist views, and the Mexican 1910 Centennial and Mexican Revolution. Collections at the DeGolyer also illustrate the regime of President Porfirio Díaz (r. 1876–1910) and the eventual struggle for power between the old guard and working-class people leading to the revolution. The Mexican Revolution was a drawn out, violent, and bloody affair, and the DeGolyer has important collections relating to the conflict. The Norwick Center for Digital Services (nCDS), a unit of Southern Methodist University’s Central University Libraries (CUL), is working with the DeGolyer Library to put an increasing number of the Mexican collections online. The DeGolyer Library’s digitized Mexican accessions are available in the "Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints" digital collection, which is part of the CUL Digital Collections website. The nCDS and the DeGolyer Library have documented the digital collection’s use in a variety of publications, exhibits, and educational applications. The primary resources available in "Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints" are widely used throughout Mexico by Mexican academic researchers, school students, and the general public. The digital collection is also utilized in many other countries by scholars and people who want to learn more about Mexico’s rich cultural heritage and tumultuous past. The nCDS and the DeGolyer Library are continuing to augment this popular digital resource, one that is growing use for the study of Mexican history.

Digital Resources: The Mexican Digital Library, BDMx (Mexican National Council for Culture and the Arts)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Martínez Baracs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
National Council ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Photography Collections

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The Biblioteca Digital Mexicana (BDMx) provides access—for the average user as well as for students and scholars—to significant historical materials, "unpublished or very rare," as was said in the second half of the nineteenth century, the golden age of Mexican historiography. The BDMx is not concerned with documents that have a principally symbolic value (such as autographs or decrees about the founding of cities); rather, it deals with those with high cultural density, whose value is not diminished upon their first reading. Finally, the BDMx contains only materials that are not already easily found online, which, unfortunately, excludes a great number of very valuable works. This initiative was founded and directed with the support of a directorial council comprised of the directors of four important Mexican institutions connected to Mexican history and culture: the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH), the Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (CEHM-Carso), and the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta). With this institutional backing, the BDMx has been able to add eight additional archives and libraries, and it continues to grow. The AGN houses most national historical archives; the BNAH holds the main Mesoamerican Codices collection of the country, and its Colección Antigua has long been appreciated by scholars, with holdings such as the Franciscan Archives collection; CEHM-Carso is a private library that has acquired unique archival collections; Conaculta is our Ministry of Culture and, as such, has under its wing many regional museums, important photography collections, and more. The BDMx also works closely with the Universidad Iberoamericana's Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavijero, a private library that holds the Porfirio Díaz Archives and much more. And the Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra, founded in the nineteenth century, holds a trove of historical maps. The BDMx chooses the documents by common agreement with the curators of these collections. It looks for variety in the types of documents and supportive materials (books, other publications, manuscripts, pictography, photography, lithography, and so on). The themes are self-selected, due to their own worth and because they might mark an important anniversary or a centennial. Up to the present, some of the principal selections have been Mesoamerican codices, the unpublished oeuvre of Guillén de Lampart, ancient maps and plans, and the work of Rodrigo de Vivero. Each item is accompanied by a historiographical introduction that aims to be up to date and relevant. The user is distracted with nothing other than the presentation of the documents, in a clean and friendly format. And the worth of the project lies in the quality of the documents. This is an example where less is more.

Digital Resources: Spanish Sources for Latin American History

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Search Techniques ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Finding Aids

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The essential online digital collections for Latin American history in Spain are the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deportes (MECD)’s Portal de Archivos Españoles, the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s online catalogue, and the Biblioteca of the Real Academia de la Historia’s finding aids. Collectively these three collections, as well as a few additional provincial and municipal archives, offer a meaningful access point to the growing body of digital records pertaining to Latin American history. While digitized images of all manuscripts, maps, drawings, and art are not fully accessible through these online portals, their finding aids and catalogues are quite robust and provide sufficient guidance to researchers so that they can either electronically request copies or prepare for an efficient, onsite review of documents. Access to these resources on Latin American history has largely been funded directly by Spanish governmental entities, but also through generous subventions provided by the private sector. In particular, the banking industry has been a significant contributor to the preservation and dissemination of documents pertaining to the Spanish and Spanish-American patrimony. Unfortunately, this trend has subsided since the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, but Spanish institutions are rapidly remedying the effects of this lingering situation. By crafting collaborative programmatic initiatives, such as the Revealing Cooperation and Conflict Project (RCCP), Spain continues to make additional collections available via the Internet. For example, this endeavor, supported by the city of Plasencia, the diocese of Plasencia, the Centro Sefarad Israel (Madrid), MECD, and eight universities, is generating transcriptions of cathedral and municipal records from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for communities such as Plasencia, Spain. This city, as well as the province of Extremadura, is particularly important to Latin American history as large numbers of Spanish conquistadors, explorers, and settler families in Latin America hailed from this region, and they created a two-way transatlantic bridge of peoples and documents during the colonial era. Equally important to locating these digital collections is the researcher’s use of specialized search techniques for each of these online sources. As one might imagine, simple and advanced search tools offered via the Portal de Archivos Españoles, also known as PARES, will not generate accurate or complete listings of available documents. Rather, it is critical that researchers understand how archives such as the Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla) have arranged their collections and to adjust their search techniques to locate more resources. One specific limitation of PARES, at this moment, is that often it will report a “signatura” for a specific document (for example, “CHARCAS,415,L.1,F.143V(1)”), but will also erroneously indicate that a digital copy is not available. That is, the original document is available only for physical viewing at the AGI-Sevilla or by ordering a reproduction. Scholars might believe that many of the documents they are searching for and locating using PARES are not digitized — but in actuality they do exist in electronic format. Thus, researchers must modify their search methods to find hidden pathways to electronic copies. For example, digital images of sixteenth-century colonial governance records for present-day Peru and Bolivia can be located by performing a search for an entire book of the Audiencia de Charcas (i.e., “CHARCAS, 415, L.1”). The world of Latin American digital manuscripts, art collections, maps, and other paraphernalia is rapidly expanding during this second decade of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Voices of Mexican history in Sophia Segovia's novel «The Murmur of Bees»

2021 ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Liudmila Okuneva
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mexican History

The article examines the novel by the Mexican writer Sofia Segovia «The Murmur of Bees», published in Russian in 2021. The novel, written in the genre of Latin American "magical realism", describes the dramatic events of the period of "revolutionary caudillism" that followed the Mexican revolution of 1910—1917. The novel, which is a literary discovery of the year, provides an interpretation of revolutionary events that is unusual for official historiography.

Political Historietas and Graphic Humor in Argentina

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Vazquez
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
English Word ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Daily News ◽  
Political Humor ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Economic Elite ◽  
The 1960S

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The Spanish word “historietas,” like the English word “comics,” refers to a broad and heterogeneous body of work. A comic strip, a comic series, and a graphic novel are obviously not the same thing. One term can hide genres as diverse as gag cartoons, caricatures, illustrations, figurative narration, and narrative figuration. While comic strips and historietas often share a metonymic perspective, they represent two distinct practices. Comic strips published in newspapers and magazines are part of a hybrid genre similar to cartoons and historietas. Comic strips and cartoons both feature stand-alone stories. Comic strips and historietas both present their plots in a sequential graphic narrative. Historietas differ from comic strips and cartoons by appearing in adventure magazines, graphic novels, and serials that vary in content and publication format, each adhering to its own production conditions and genre rules. Graphic humor in Argentina has historically been tied to the political and economic elite. Even so, graphic humorists were able to surreptitiously convey subversive messages through their drawings and words. To work in the professional print industry has long been defined as having one foot in media business and the other in public interest. Due to the types of publications featuring historietas, their circulation, and their readership, historieta artists (historietistas) enjoyed a comparatively greater degree of autonomy in communicating social and political criticism. For graphic humor, its comedy or realism is connected to the type of commentary that appears in the opinion page of the daily news. Such is the case with magazines like Tía Vicenta, Humor Registrado, Satiricón, and Hortensia. The central characteristics of political humor link a historieta to the social and cultural conventions of its time. Graphic humor can be read in light of the ways it is unavoidably intertextual and metacommunicational, conditioned by existing discourse. Starting in the 1960s, realist and adventure historietas cultivated stylistic voics in tune with emerging forms of reflexive irony and the historieta’s unique visual properties. Playful experimentation in the textual and graphic dimensions of the historieta resulted in strongly political tales with elements of novelty and improvisation. Historietas written by Héctor Oesterheld and drawn by Alberto Breccia are paradigmatic of this tension between historietas and politics. Their narrative and aesthetic innovations highlight how historietas can be organized as ideological discourse, intervening alongside popular culture in the debates and dilemmas of the time.

Digital Resources: The Handbook of Latin American Studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine D. McCann ◽  
Tracy North
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
History Of

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is a selective annotated bibliography of works about Latin America. Continuously published since 1936, the Handbook has been compiled and edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress for seventy-five years. Published works in multiple languages are selected for inclusion in the Handbook by a cadre of contributing editors, actively working scholars who provide a service to the field by annotating works of lasting scholarly value and writing bibliographical essays noting major trends, changes, and gaps in existing research. In 1995, the Hispanic Division launched the website HLAS Online, providing access to a database of more than 340,000 annotated citations. The ability to search across more than 50 volumes of the Handbook with a single query gave researchers unprecedented access to years of scholarship on Latin America. In 2000, HLAS Web, a new search interface with more robust functionality, was launched. The two sites link researchers worldwide to a vast body of selected resources on Latin America. The Handbook itself has become a record of the history of the field of Latin American studies and an indicator of changing trends in the field. With digital access to Handbook citations of books, articles, and more, scholars are able not only to identify specific works of interest, but also to follow the rise of new areas of study, such as women’s studies, cultural history, environmental history, and Atlantic studies, among others.

Public Expenditures & Social Change in Mexico: A Methodological Critique

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
David Barkin
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Public Expenditures ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Federal Expenditure

During the three years since its publication, The Mexican Revolution Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910 has gained an important place on the bookshelves not only of Mexicanists but also of students of social change in general. The appearance of a revised edition in paperback which proudly announces that it won the Bolton Prize as the best book in the field of Latin American history in 1967 is further testimony to the esteem in which this work is held by James Wilkie's colleagues. It seems appropriate at this juncture to re-examine the analysis to determine whether the test of time confirms the eulogies of a few years ago.

Emiliano Zapata and the Old Regime: Myth, Memory, and Method

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-365
Author(s):  
William Schell
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
John Steinbeck ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Elia Kazan

Four decades after its publication, John Womack's masterpiece Zapata and the Mexican Revolution remains the definitive account of the man and his movement and the basis of the generally agreed upon facts. It is also perhaps the most cited work of Anglophone Latin American history. This is not hyperbole. The index of Alan Knight's highly regarded Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants lists thirty-seven pages under ““Zapata, Emiliano.””Womack is cited fifty-six times on twenty-three of them. Not infrequently, when Knight cites other accounts of Zapata's rebellion, Womack is the underlying source. And underlying Womack's account is that of John Steinbeck and Elia Kazan's film ¡¡Viva Zapata!! The cinematic influence of their true invention is most evident in Womack's account of Zapata's Porfirian period, with which this piece is largely concerned. Cuatro déécadas despuéés de su publicacióón, la obra maestra de John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, sigue siendo el recuento definitivo del hombre y de su movimiento y la base de lo que generalmente se cree son los hechos reales. Tambiéén es, quizáás, el trabajo máás citado de habla inglesa de la historia de Améérica Latina. Esto no es una hipéérbole. El ííndice del tan admirado libro de Alan Knight, Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants cita treinta y siete pááginas en ““Zapata, Emiliano.”” Womack es citado cincuenta y seis veces en veinte y tres de ellas. No es infrecuente que cuando Knight cita otras referencias de la rebelióón de Zapata, Womack es la fuente ulterior. Sin embargo, en la historia de Womack se puede discernir a la vez la influencia de John Steinbeck y la pelíícula de Elia Kazan, ¡¡Viva Zapata!! Este documento explora esta influencia como un llamado a reconocer y ejercer las poderosas fuentes no verbales (pictóóricas, cinematográáficas y musicales) que dan forma a nuestra percepcióón del pasado.

Yellow Fever in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariola Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Latin American ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Single Episode ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Caribbean

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Yellow fever was one of the most dreaded diseases in the Caribbean region from its first appearance in the 1650s until the confirmation of its spread via the bites of infected mosquitos in 1900. Fear of the disease resulted from not just its high mortality rate, but also the horrifying manner in which it killed its victims: after several days of fever, chills, and body aches, the skin and eyes of those who were most seriously infected would turn yellow as their livers failed, they would bleed from the eyes and nose, and they would succumb to the vomiting of coagulated blood. Because the virus caused only mild symptoms in children and a single episode confers lifetime immunity, the disease did not heavily impact natives of the region. Instead, it was newcomers in the Caribbean who suffered the worst ravages.

The Saamaka Maroons of Suriname

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Price ◽  
Sally Price
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin American ◽  
French Guiana ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
The State ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Amazonian Rainforest

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Fifty years ago, we began wide-ranging anthropological and historical work with Saamaka Maroons, the descendants of slaves who had escaped from the plantations of coastal Suriname in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and established an independent society and culture deep in the Amazonian rainforest. Then a colony of the Netherlands, Suriname became an independent republic in 1975. Events of the 1980s and 1990s—most notably a civil war between the State and the Maroons and the subsequent decision by the State to exploit the timber and mineral riches of the Saamakas’ traditional territory—have led to wrenching changes for people who were once the masters of their forest realm. As the most visible and activist academic supporters of the Saamakas, the authors were barred from Suriname by the national government and, since 1986, have been condemned to continuing work in neighboring French Guiana (Guyane), where tens of thousands of Saamakas in exile have become part of a complex multi-ethnic society driven by strong assimilationist policies authored in Paris. During this same period, the authors have become increasingly involved in activism, assisting the Saamaka people in Suriname in their struggle to protect their territory, which has unfolded before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. What are the moral dilemmas posed by this activist work? What has it been like writing Saamaka ethnography and history from the excentric location of Guyane? How do we imagine the book that we will never get to write, about changes and continuities in Saamaka life over the past fifty years?

Ecological Science in Latin America and the Caribbean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Raby
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Ecological Research ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Caribbean

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Fieldwork in Latin America and the Caribbean has played a major role in the development of the modern science of ecology––the study of organisms’ relationships with each other and the physical environment. Since the colonial era, natural historical knowledge grew and circulated through expeditions and naturalists’ encounters with indigenous and enslaved people’s environmental knowledge. Observations of the life histories, behavior, and geographical distribution of the regions’ species laid the groundwork for the emergence of ecology as a self-conscious discipline during the late 19th century. Major figures in the foundation of ecology were inspired by travel throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and especially by the large number and variety of species found in rainforests and other tropical areas. The growth of colonial and independent national scientific institutions––including botanical gardens, museums, and geographical surveys––also created important foundations for ecological research, although these were primarily oriented toward agricultural and economic improvement. As field stations specifically devoted to ecological research emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, long-term, place-based studies of living organisms became possible for the first time. Research at such institutions helped to shape key ecological concepts––including the ecological community, ecosystems, and species diversity––and contributed directly to the rise of the biodiversity ideal in conservation. Despite their historic importance, field studies in Latin America and the Caribbean remain significantly underrepresented in ecology today.

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