Lara Nicosia is the liaison librarian for History and she is always happy to help!
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This page provides recommendations on where to search for both primary and secondary sources focused on Latin American and Caribbean history. Scroll down to read each section, or use the icons below to jump to a section of interest:
Reference works such as encyclopedias are great resources to consult at the start of any research project. These sources can inspire topic ideas, provide necessary background context, suggest key terms and phrases, and highlight themes and controversies, all of which can help you get a handle on your topic before you start diving into the academic literature and/or primary source research.
The library's collection includes an assortment of reference works related to Caribbean and Latin American history. Try searching our collection for encyclopedias (both print and electronic) that have been tagged as being about Caribbean or Latin American history.
Primary Sources
For historical research, the phrase "primary sources" refers to items that were created at the time an event occurred usually by direct observers or participants. Primary sources are not limited to traditional text-based documents such as newspaper articles and journal entries; photographs, posters, audio recordings, video clips, books, and more can all serve as primary sources if they are used as evidence of the time in which they were created. It's not about the source type...it's about how the source is used for your research.
Artstor contains over one million images from museums, libraries, and other collections around the world. These images include photographs, scanned documents, maps, three-dimensional artifacts, and more. Try searching by material type, geography, date, etc. using the "Advanced Search" feature.
including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.
This project by the U.S. Library of Congress provides free access to "significant primary materials from all countries and cultures" including prints, photographs, newspapers, maps, journals, manuscripts, and books. The site is supported by UNESCO, as well as libraries, museums, and other educational institutions around the world.
Use this tool to identify online primary source collections of interest focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. Need resources from a specific country? Use the "Collection Content by Country" filter on the right hand side.
This repository provides open access to materials in Princeton University's Latin American Ephemera Collection including over 18,000 items from both Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th century. Ephemera typically refers to objects that are not intended for long-term use such as pamphlets, flyers, postcards, brochures, etc.
The Ibero-American Institute "is an interdisciplinary center for academic and cultural exchange between Germany and Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal." This digital collection contains over 6,000 items including books, journals, photographs, maps, posters, manuscripts
This database contains more than five million pages of content consisting of books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries. Materials in this collection focus on the "abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions."
Includes documents from the United States and Europe, as well as other parts of the world. In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, Slavery and Anti-Slavery contains documents from several archives such as the American Missionary Association.
This database includes scans from over 150 news titles primarily published in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands from 1718-1876. Items are in English, Spanish, Danish, and French. Use the "Browse Publications" option near the top of the database's landing page to browse by title, location, date, and language.
This database includes scans from over 50 news titles primarily published in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela from 1805-1920. Items are in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Use the "Browse Publications" option near the top of the database's landing page to browse by title, location, date, and language.
This database includes scans from over 260 news titles primarily published in Belize, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Paraguay from 1822-1922. Items are in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Use the "Browse Publications" option near the top of the database's landing page to browse by title, location, date, and language.
This database provides open access scans of over 1,000 newspaper titles from Mexico’s pre-independence, independence and revolutionary periods (1807-1929).
Hosted by the University of Arizona, this database includes Mexican and Mexican American publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.
Brazil's National Digital Library (BN Digital) includes an assortment of digitized resources from throughout Brazil's history - most items are in Portuguese.
Digital collection of digitized materials from Mexico primarily from the National Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Nacional) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico).
Focused on the history of the Americas, this database includes an assortment of primary source documents relevant to Latin America and the Caribbean primarily consisting of monographs, pamphlets, and other serials. Try adding "Latin America," "Caribbean Islands," "Central American," "South America," or a specific country as subject terms to your search to locate items specifically related to these areas.
Based on Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America from Its Discovery to the Present Time
HathiTrust includes digital scans of millions of books and documents, many of which are freely available for download. After running a search, try using the "Place of Publication" or the "Date of Publication" facets to narrow your search. Be sure to login with your UR credentials for additional download options.
LAMP is focused on "providing scholars in the United States and abroad with microform copies of materials not readily available." You can use the "Collection Guides" to identify documents of interest and then request the materials for free through interlibrary loan.
Secondary Research
Secondary sources and other supporting research materials provide an interpretation or analysis of historical topics, figures, and/or events and build context around the primary sources you are using for your research. There are many kinds of secondary sources, but some of the most common for academic research are scholarly books and e-books and peer-reviewed journal articles.
This bibliography is a critical resource for Latin American research with 2-3,000 annotated entries contributed by scholars each year. This link (HLAS Online) searches the index from 1935-present; if you're interested in research from 1970-present, the HLAS Web interface is a bit more user-friendly. If you find a resource of interest, try searching for the title on the library's website to see if we have a copy or to request the item through interlibrary loan.
Covers anthropology, art, economics, geography, government and politics, history, international relations, literature, music, philosophy and sociology.
JSTOR is a great starting place for most topics. Particularly strong in the humanities and social sciences, JSTOR provides access to a wide range of journals from history, area studies, anthropology, literature, film and media studies, and more.
Subject areas include African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, business, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology, statistics. The University of Rochester Libraries currently subscribes to the following multidisciplinary JSTOR Collections: Arts and Sciences I through XV. JSTOR also packages their content in disciplinary collections; however, the only ones of these that we have licensed are the Biological Sciences segment and the first of the Business collections. For alumni access, see also Alumni Library Gateway.
Historical Abstracts is a key database for non-U.S. and non-Canadian historical research. This is an abstract database, so if you don't see the full-text for an article, click the red "FindText@UR" button to see if UR provides full-text access through another database (we often do!).
Project Muse is a great resource for finding articles on your topic. Like JSTOR, it provides access to scholarly journal articles from a range of humanities and social science disciplines.
Remember to try out some of the multidisciplinary databases on the "Scholarly Articles" tab as well – those databases are useful for most topics
Use this database to search for articles and reviews from journals edited in 24 different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as from publications (e.g. monographs and conference proceedings) that focus on Pan-American issues. Resources are in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French – to search for articles written in English, search for Inglés using the "Language Phrase" dropdown (Show Me). If you find a resource of interest, try searching for the title on the library's website to see if we have a copy or to request the item through interlibrary loan.
Finding English Language Results in Clase and Periódica
This partnership between the CLACSO Virtual Libraries Network and Redalyc provides access to over 400,000 articles primarily from peer-reviewed open access journals including over 50 history titles.
Started in 1975 by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), this database contains over 350,000 records for bibliographic records of articles, book reviews, and more published across 1,500 journals in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many of the titles are available for full-text download, but if not try searching for the title on the library's website to see if we have a copy or to request the item through interlibrary loan.
LAPTOC searches across tables of contents for journals published in Latin America and the Caribbean primarily between 1994 and 2009 – this tool indexes more than 340,000 articles in a variety of languages. If you find an article of interest, try searching for the title on the library's website to see if we have a copy or to request the item through interlibrary loan.
Digital Collections
