Caribbean Studies: General Primary Sources

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), housed at the Fine Arts Campus of New York City's Hunter College, was chartered as a charitable organization in the State of New York in 1983. It was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement.
Alan Lomax was a musicologist, writer and producer who spent his life capturing in sound, photographs, video and research what today is termed our "intangible heritage." The central value of his career was the promotion of cultural equity as the need for every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage, believing it should be recognized as a fundamental human right. His "Appeal for Cultural Equity" anticipated by decades UNESCO's 2003 declaration to safeguard intangible oral heritage.

Highlighted Collections include maps, Paraguayan War, Sound Recordings, Literature and Literary Studies, manuscripts, Tales & Legends, botany, musical scores, geography & travel, incunabula, newspapers & magazines and gastronomy.

The Virtual Library of Yucatan is a wide window into our past where you can find more than 450,000 pages of nearly 20,000 Yucatecan documents. In this internet portal you will find reference works such as the Yucatan Encyclopedia, novels, poems, history books, newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries, manuscripts from the 17th to 19th centuries, photographs, works in Mayan, sound recordings and many other documents. Yucatecan author or related to our region.

The bulk of the ephemera currently found in the Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera was originally created around the turn of the 20th century and after, with some originating as recently as within the last year. The formats or genre most commonly included are 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. The vast majority are rare, hard-to-find primary sources unavailable elsewhere.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. The dLOC partner institutions are the core of dLOC. dLOC partners retain all rights to their materials and provide access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. (Information on how to become a dLOC partner).

Is an open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean. Plantation slavery and settler colonialism are defining aspects of the early Caribbean—both sit at the origin of the modern capitalist world. The texts and images collected here tell the story of European imperial domination, and of the enslaved African and Indigenous American people whose lives, labor, and land shaped the culture and development of the Atlantic world. The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to "remix" the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.

This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.

The goal of this project is to create a digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries. The works selected are linked to critical essays produced by undergraduate students who are enrolled in Prof. Green's courses on Latin American history. This site will serve as a free-access visual and research tool for students and scholars alike.